Category: Transport Layer Security (TLS)

Blarg, another long title. Again. Sorry.

So, this is something that I actually discovered a while (months) ago, so my memories are already a bit less fresh, but I think I still remember the important things.

I discovered this, because I had a common TLS CipherSuite config problem: I needed a server-site cipher order (e.g server has it’s own preferences), because I had some legacy weaker cipher enabled and we obviously don’t want clients with incorrect cipher order to connect with a potentially weak suite, when there are better suites available. But I also wanted to use ChaCha (more on that later).

If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, below is a summary on how TLS cipher suite negotiation works. If you know that stuff already, skip this chapter.

TLS cipher suite negotiation

TLS negotiates a cipher suite on each connection. There are many available – some are really secure, others are “okay-ish”, others are really bad. The really bad ones are usually disabled either at server or client-side (or both). But the “okay-ish” suites are generally enabled both at server and client side, even though client and server potentially also support the strong “good” ones.
What happens is that the client gives the server a list of cipher suites, which should be sorted in order of preference, and the server chooses one of them, depending on what is supported by both.

The server has generally two ways of choosing:

• Server preference. The server maintains its own list of “preferred” cipher suites and chooses the best one on its list, depending on what the client supports.
• Client preference. The server just chooses the first suite of the clients list that both parties support.

The thing with Client preference is, that there are (or were) some clients that send incorrectly ordered cipher suite lists – they have insecure ciphers at the top and more secure ones at the bottom. If the server lets the client choose, a weak cipher suite will be negotiated, even though both parties may support something stronger.

On the other hand, if the server maintains a correctly sorted list, one can guarantee that with server preference, the server will choose the most secure option depending on what the client supports. Thats the reason why server preference is the most common setting in real-world TLS.

Just use server cipher order and be done with it!

Yeah, that’s what many people do. And it was fine for some time. The thing is, TLS 1.2 at some point introduced a new cipher / cipher suite:

TLS_CHACHA20_POLY1305_SHA256¹

That is an entirely new encryption algorithm (ChaCha with 20 rounds) and Poly1305 authentication. While those may not be exactly new, they were newly introduced into TLS.

What’s so special about ChaCha?

I won’t go into details here, I’m sure there are already posts elsewhere that cover this. Basically, ChaCha is (probably) secure and fast. This is interesting for machines that are not AES hardware accelerated (no AES-NI). This applies for example to most ARM based systems, like smartphones. Other examples may be IOT or embedded devices. Those don’t have accelerated AES and ChaCha is noticeably faster on those devices, especially when comparing against AES-256. Again, I won’t post big benchmarks here, those are elsewhere.

In summary, we would really want to use ChaCha on such devices.

Then just set ChaCha as preferred server cipher and be done with it!

But… I still like AES! Because that’s the thing: While ChaCha may be the new cool thing, many devices do have AES-NI (hardware accelerated AES) and thus can do AES faster than ChaCha. Plus, AES has been around for quite a while and so far we consider it secure. It’s also FIPS and similar certified, for people that are into that stuff.

So we still want to use AES! We just don’t want to use it with devices that have no AES-NI.

How can you get the best of both worlds?

What we need is something like this: If the client says “I don’t have AES-NI”, use ChaCha. If the client doesn’t speak ChaCha, or if it has AES-NI, use AES.

But how to determine if a client doesn’t have AES-NI? Fortunately, the standards made this not that hard: Modern clients that speak ChaCha will put ChaCha on the top of their cipher list, if they don’t have AES-NI.

Older clients, or clients with AES-NI will have something else on top. So the easiest way to use ChaCha with clients is to let the clients choose: If they have ChaCha on the top, use that. If not, use whatever else they have at the top. But that puts us back to the original problem above! What if an old, broken client puts legacy stuff on the top? There was a reason why we used server cipher preference.

Okay, so we want both client AND server cipher preference. That’s sadly something that OpenSSL can’t do. But OpenSSL developers saw the issue and offered us a solution:

OpenSSL has a flag for this!

Yep, that’s right. OpenSSL has a flag, called “PrioritizeChaCha” that does exactly what I described above: It will choose ChaCha if the client says “thats my most preferred cipher suite”, but will still honor the server cipher order in all other cases.

However, that is generally a compile-time flag. Meaning that you need to compile OpenSSL with this option if you want it. This isn’t really what I consider ideal. Many people use pre-compiled packages – after all, most distros ship programs this way. Especially when talking about security relevant stuff like OpenSSL, I personally like relying on the debian security team to update important packages. I just don’t favor the idea of compiling OpenSSL myself – it’s a lot more work for me, with not much benefits.

There’s another way: Setting this without re-compiling OpenSSL!

Yup, and that’s what this blog post was supposed to be about. The entire text wall above was just introduction for this.

OpenSSL has a config file. If you didn’t know that, I don’t blame you: I didn’t either, until last year or so. Since OpenSSL is mostly used as a library, there isn’t much to configure. On Debian-like systems, the file is /etc/ssl/openssl.cnf. The majority of this file is related to Certificate Authority settings. That’s because you can make your own CA with OpenSSL and that file is for persistently setting parameters needed for a (more or less) real CA.

But you can set more than just CA-specific parameters! The file can do more. Documentation has been sparse previously, but has been improved a lot recently. You can find documentation for it here. Thanks to Geert for pointing this out.

I will now try to give some guidance for that file. Ignore all the CA stuff – I’m not going to explain that. I’m interested in what this file can do to modify the TLS behavior.

Basically, the file is structured in sections, which are formatted like this: [section_name] followed by a list of settings valid for that section. A section ends when the next section starts.

In order to configure TLS options, we need to look at what sections are reponsible for that. The starting point is the setting openssl_conf which is part of some kind of “root section” that has no specific name. The default value of openssl_conf is set to default_conf. In order to define what default_conf should be, you can define a section called default_conf that sets everything you want.

Since we’re interested in TLS (SSL) specific settings, we set the ssl_conf parameter in our custom default_conf to the name of a section, let’s say ssl_sect (short for ssl_section). In the ssl_sect we then declare a setting system_default which holds some TLS options, unless the application overrides them explicitly. We set system_default to system_default_sect, again that is short for “system default section”.

In this section, we finally get to set our TLS/SSL parameters. You can for example define custom TLS min/max versions, default cipher suites and most importantly flags like PrioritizeChaCha.

[default_conf]
ssl_conf = ssl_sect

[ssl_sect]
system_default = system_default_sect

[system_default_sect]
MinProtocol = TLSv1.2
CipherString = DEFAULT@SECLEVEL=2
Options = PrioritizeChaCha,NoRenegotiation

The example above sets default parameters for each application that doesn’t specify anything else on it’s own:

• Minimum TLS version is set to TLS 1.2
• Some insecure cipher suites are disabled (security level is set to two). See the SECLEVEL documentation here and note the exact defintions of them tend to change between (major) OpenSSL releases.
• Two flags are set: PrioritizeChaCha and NoRenegotation

The important things here are the flags: PrioritizeChaCha is explained in the beginning of this post. This config would enable the flag by default for all applications using OpenSSL. The other flag, NoRenegotation, disables TLS renegotiation. That’s mostly “for fun”. Renegotation was broken in the past, has not much use and was even killed in TLS 1.3, so not much reason to have it on in TLS 1.2 either.

Since I feel like this post is already way longer than intended, I will stop here. If you have any further questions about some of the topics covered here, feel free to use the comment section below. Or email me directly – my email is here somewhere.