As an end user, what risk is there in browsing a public website that uses TLSv1?

There is currently no real risk just based on the TLS protocol version for the end user when visiting a site which provides only TLS 1.0 (TLSv1) with a modern browser, i.e. a current version of Chrome, Firefox, Edge or chromium based browsers like Opera. Fortunately browser vendors today actually care about security and if TLS 1.0 would be too insecure it would be switched off or be restricted to only some white-listed sites or only for use with some ciphers.

On the other hand: if a site is still offering only TLS 1.0 you might ask yourself how their relation to security is in general. While there might be some sites which knowingly support only TLS 1.0 it is more likely that they use some old systems or setups which is not able to support TLS 1.2 yet. Given that the most commonly used server-side SSL stack OpenSSL has support of TLS 1.2 since version 1.0.1 released in 2012 and that even OpenSSL 1.0.1 is out of support since some time, it is not unlikely that the owners of the site don't really care about security and that the rest of their infrastructure is outdated too. And that should worry you, not the use of TLS 1.0 by itself.


As an end user, probably nothing. The very stage where you are at the communication sequence of a TLS transaction makes it so you are not really vulnerable to anything other than MITM.

Most of the discovered vulnerabilities discovered on the protocol and it's implementation itself, on the other hand, may impact the server responsible for hosting it. Even then, TLSv1 is not nearly as problematic as the older brother, SSL.

If we ever achieve RCE on the SSL/TLS communication phase, we are in serious problems.