The Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race 2022

This years Sydney to Hobart was a stunning race. Coverage on broadcast TV in Australia started with good coverage by Seven West Media’s 7+ service. The stunning coverage included a view of the four simultaneous start lines for the different classes:

Four start lines of the 2022 Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race, taken from @CYCATV on YouTube

Sadly, the broadcast TV coverage ended just after the start. With 7+ on the sail of one of the boats, I was expecting a bit more coverage.

Luckily the CYC had an intermittent live stream on YouTube, with Peter Shipway (nominative determinism at work there), Gordon Bray and Peter Gee hosting.

The primary website for the race this year was https://www.rolexsydneyhobart.com/, and this year this appeared to be running via AWS CloudFront.

Time for a quick health check, with SSL Labs:

After noting this is CloudFront, I notice that its resolved as IPv4 only. Shame, as IPv6 is just two steps away: tick a box in the CloudFront config, and publish an AAAA record in DNS. Its also interesting that some of the sub-resources being loaded on their page from alternate origins are available over IPv6 (as well as good old IPv4).

Talking of DNS, a quick nslookup shows Route53 in use.

Back to the output, a B. Here’s a few items observed on the SSLLabs report:

  • TLS 1.1 is enabled – it’s well past time to retire this. Luckily, TLS 1.2 and 1.3 are both enabled.
  • Even with TLS 1.2, there are some weak ciphers, but (luckily?) the first one in the list is reasonably strong.
  • HTTP/2 is not enabled (falling back to HTTP/1.1).
  • HTTP/3 is not enabled. Even more performance than HTTP/2.
  • Amazon Certificate Manager (ACM) is in use for the TLS certificate on CloudFront

It also says that there is no DNS CAA record, a simple way to lock out any other CA provider being duped into mis-issuance of a certificate. A low risk, but a (free) way to prevent this.

Turning to SecurityHeaders.com, we get this:

SecurityHeaders.com output for rolexsydneyhobart.com, December 2022

Unfortunately, looks like no security related headers are sent.

Strict Transport Security (HSTS) is a no-brainer these days. We (as a world) have all gone TLS for online security, and we’re not heading back to unencrypted HTTP.

The service stayed up and responsive: well done to the team who put this together, and good luck with looking through the event and finding improvements (like above) for next year.