The Electronic Frontier Foundation's SSL Observatory is a research project that gathers and analyzes the cryptographic certificates used to secure Internet connections, systematically cataloging them and exposing their database for other scientists, researchers and cryptographers to consult.

Now Arjen Lenstra of École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne has used the SSL Observatory dataset to show that tens of thousands of SSL certificates "offer effectively no security due to weak random number generation algorithms." Lenstra's research means that much of what we think of as gold-standard, rock-solid network security is deeply flawed, but it also means that users and website operators can detect and repair these vulnerabilities.