by David Radcliffe and André Arko

Security is one of our top concerns for RubyGems.org. It’s a constant balance between providing easy access for all users and providing only the most secure ways of connecting. For the last few years, we’ve continued to allow several outdated, insecure, and weak cryptographic standards.

With this post, we are announcing the immediate deprecation and future disabling of TLSv1 and TLSv1.1 for all HTTPS connections to RubyGems.org. Both TLSv1 and TLSv1.1 will be disabled, and TLSv1.2 will be required, starting on April 30th, 2018.

As of February 2018, almost all HTTPS traffic to RubyGems.org already uses TLSv1.2. Based on current usage statistics, we expect this cutoff to impact less than 1.5% of requests made to RubyGems.org.

Why disable old versions of TLS?

There are several reasons, but ultimately all of the reasons come down to keeping HTTPS connections as secure as they claim to be. Connections that use TLSv1.0 or TLSv1.1 are no longer considered fully secure by the industry, and it is misleading to allow “secure” connections that are not truly secure.

The various security issues with older versions of TLS have resulted in industry-wide changes to stop supporting them. The PCI Security Standards Council has mandated that any website that processes payments must stop using TLSv1.0 or TLSv1.1. As a result of those requirements, developer websites like GitHub are also removing support for older TLS versions. Additionally, our upstream provider Fastly will be removing support for older TLS versions no later than June 30, 2018.

While we don’t process payments directly on RubyGems.org, we serve code that is used to process payments. To keep our users secure, we will be adopting the same security standards as the PCI SSC and the rest of the industry.

Compatibility check and troubleshooting

We have created an automatic SSL check to tell you whether your Ruby will be able to connect to RubyGems.org after April 30. To run that script immediately, use this command: $ curl -sL https://git.io/vQhWq | ruby . If you’d like more details about the situation, including troubleshooting steps if you run into problems, check out the Bundler and RubyGems TLS/SSL troubleshooting guide.

Known incompatible clients

Ruby linked against OpenSSL versions 1.0.0t or lower will not be able to connect to RubyGems.org. This is because support for TLSv1.2 was added in OpenSSL 1.0.1, released March 12, 2012. You can check the version of OpenSSL that your Ruby links against by running ruby -ropenssl -e 'puts OpenSSL::OPENSSL_LIBRARY_VERSION' .

JRuby running on JVM 6 or lower will not be able to connect to RubyGems.org. This is because the JVM added support for TLSv1.2 in Java 7, released July 28, 2011. You can check your Java version by running java -version , and looking for text like java version "1.7.0_71" . If you are running Java 7, the version number will start with 1.7.

Further help

If you are unable to connect to RubyGems.org after April 30, 2018, please refer to the additional help section of the guide for instructions on how to troubleshoot the issue, and how to open a ticket if necessary.