At Opera, we have always strived to provide the most trustworthy and secure products to our users. Security is especially important in the context of web browsers, which are often used to exchange sensitive or confidential data over networks.

However, the Internet challenges both the browsers and the security standards, and to meet those expectations they need to be kept under permanent development. It’s a constant race, as some encryption methods that are considered secure today might become broken and not be secure in the future.

You are probably familiar with the padlock icon appearing near your browser’s address bar, which indicates that your connection is secure. However, if your browser doesn’t follow modern security standards, this icon might be misleading or even get you into trouble.

Therefore, Opera Mini offers you compatibility with the currently most advanced version of TLS. Moreover, as with most clients using TLS, we have deprecated RC4 from the list of secure ciphers. We also support modern ciphers like AES-GCM and ECC, so you can be sure that your personal details, like credit-card numbers or passwords are safe. This update has been deployed on Opera Mini servers, so there is actually nothing to be done on the client’s side.

You can verify your client’s security level by going to a website like www.ssllabs.com from Opera Mini. Open it, and feel free to compare the result with those for other browsers. Opera Mini stands in one line with “big” browsers, like Opera for Android, Chrome and Firefox. All of them are detected as secure browsers, but only Opera Mini takes care of your data plan. However there are still some proxy-based browsers, which support the outdated RC4 in their cipher sets and very old protocols like SSL 3 or even SSL 2. Moreover they might be vulnerable to some well known attacks like FREAK, POODLE, or Logjam.

We hope that by bringing this update to you, your daily internet surfing will remain at the safest possible level and allow you to fully enjoy the webpages you visit.

With contribution from Marcin Mosiolek. Thank you! 🙂

 

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