Tag Archives: forward secrecy

Security

Enabling Forward Secrecy in Apache

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I tried to follow the instructions given in this article by Ivan Ristic, but somehow it seems not to be working, or the test at https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/ might be broken… 🙁

Unfortunately I can’t seem to comment on Ivan’s article (I even registered just to reply), so I created this blog post, hoping that my trackback will work…

This is what I have in Apache:

SSLHonorCipherOrder On
SSLCipherSuite ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:AES128-GCM-SHA256:RC4:HIGH:!MD5:!aNULL:!EDH

According to the output of openssl ciphers this should enable the following cipher suites (filtered by only those that contain ECDHE):

ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256 TLSv1.2 Kx=ECDH     Au=RSA  Enc=AES(128)  Mac=SHA256
ECDHE-RSA-RC4-SHA       SSLv3 Kx=ECDH     Au=RSA  Enc=RC4(128)  Mac=SHA1
ECDHE-ECDSA-RC4-SHA     SSLv3 Kx=ECDH     Au=ECDSA Enc=RC4(128)  Mac=SHA1
ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 TLSv1.2 Kx=ECDH     Au=RSA  Enc=AESGCM(256) Mac=AEAD
ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 TLSv1.2 Kx=ECDH     Au=ECDSA Enc=AESGCM(256) Mac=AEAD
ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384 TLSv1.2 Kx=ECDH     Au=RSA  Enc=AES(256)  Mac=SHA384
ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA384 TLSv1.2 Kx=ECDH     Au=ECDSA Enc=AES(256)  Mac=SHA384
ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA    SSLv3 Kx=ECDH     Au=RSA  Enc=AES(256)  Mac=SHA1
ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA  SSLv3 Kx=ECDH     Au=ECDSA Enc=AES(256)  Mac=SHA1
ECDHE-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA  SSLv3 Kx=ECDH     Au=RSA  Enc=3DES(168) Mac=SHA1
ECDHE-ECDSA-DES-CBC3-SHA SSLv3 Kx=ECDH     Au=ECDSA Enc=3DES(168) Mac=SHA1
ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 TLSv1.2 Kx=ECDH     Au=RSA  Enc=AESGCM(128) Mac=AEAD
ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 TLSv1.2 Kx=ECDH     Au=ECDSA Enc=AESGCM(128) Mac=AEAD
ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA256 TLSv1.2 Kx=ECDH     Au=ECDSA Enc=AES(128)  Mac=SHA256
ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA    SSLv3 Kx=ECDH     Au=RSA  Enc=AES(128)  Mac=SHA1
ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA  SSLv3 Kx=ECDH     Au=ECDSA Enc=AES(128)  Mac=SHA1

As far as I can tell this should include the below cipher suites which supposedly enable forward secrecy:

    TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_SHA
    TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA
    TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA
    TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_3DES_EDE_CBC_SHA

Unfortunately the above SSL test shows the following when running towards my Apache:

Forward Secrecy 	No

Does anyone know what that means? Is the test just broken, or am I misunderstanding anything?