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18.1 Legacy Series / TLS Ciphers - RSA vs ECDSA
« on: May 30, 2018, 09:30:50 pm »
I have noted some unusual behavior with the TLS ciphers available in 18.1.8. I enabled several "secure" ciphers and, naturally, locked myself out temporarily (always have backups!). After restoring the last good config, I decided to probe a bit further to see what was actually reciprocated in the TLS handshake and was quite surprised. Specifically, I hoped to lockdown the ciphers for remote administration to only ECDHE_ECDSA using GCM, but apparently those ciphers aren't actually working. I ran some tests using SSLyze and these are the results that concerned me.
I switched to LibreSSL with no difference in the handshake results, so I don't think the library is at fault (but obviously I'm not certain). Perhaps it's a known bug, but I couldn't find anything here in the forums or elsewhere. And I'm sure there may be other ciphers that should work, but I didn't try. I can post my full handshake results if anyone's interested.
I don't expect that this issue rates very highly on anyone's list given the other issues noted, but I thought it was worth posting here in case someone is looking in the future for why they were locked out after tightening their ciphers. In particular, it appears that the best option available with modern browsers is TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384.
Code: [Select]
TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 ECDH-384 bits 256 bits
TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 ECDH-384 bits 128 bits
TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 TLS / Alert: handshake failure
TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 TLS / Alert: handshake failure
I switched to LibreSSL with no difference in the handshake results, so I don't think the library is at fault (but obviously I'm not certain). Perhaps it's a known bug, but I couldn't find anything here in the forums or elsewhere. And I'm sure there may be other ciphers that should work, but I didn't try. I can post my full handshake results if anyone's interested.
I don't expect that this issue rates very highly on anyone's list given the other issues noted, but I thought it was worth posting here in case someone is looking in the future for why they were locked out after tightening their ciphers. In particular, it appears that the best option available with modern browsers is TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384.