Tweaking the SSL cipher settings for 2020 / 2020-02-17

A few days ago I changed the configuration of haproxy to stop accepting TLSv1.0 and TLSv1.1. With the upcoming deprecation of TLSv1.0 and TLSv1.1 this seemed the right SSL configuration. Today I remembered there is one directly reachable Apache server, so I had a look at the settings there and checked the results with the Qualys SSL Labs SSL Server test where I noticed some ciphers listed as 'weak'. And seeing different results between my haproxy and apache servers, which I did not expect as I used the same settings for SSLCipherSuite in Apache and ssl-default-bind-ciphers in haproxy.

The last issue was caused by the fact that Apache2.4.25 in Devuan ascii uses libssl 1.0.2 and haproxy 1.7.5 uses libssl 1.1.0. I'm not sure that's an ideal configuration but it's what I work with.

With the output of openssl ciphers -v I get a list of cipher names. But this is with libssl1.1.0 so the output lists ciphers that Apache doesn't have access to (yet). The good part is that Apache ignores ciphers that aren't available, so the net result is a running and working configuration.

The current result is for Apache 2.4.25:

SSLProtocol All -SSLv2 -SSLv3 -TLSv1 -TLSv1.1
SSLHonorCipherOrder on
SSLCipherSuite ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:DHE-RSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256

And for haproxy 1.7.5:

ssl-default-bind-options force-tlsv12 no-tls-tickets
ssl-default-bind-ciphers ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:DHE-RSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256

The fun part is that I can test the SSL negotiation with sslscan locally but sslscan is linked against openssl 1.0.2 so it misses some of the newer options. And I also test with the Qualys SSL Labs ssl test but that takes a while.

The too long; didn't read version of finding the right configuration options

And later I found I could have saved a lot of time researching options using the Mozilla SSL Configuration Generator. I don't completely agree with the suggestions there because I want to generate my own dhparams. Using 'well-known Diffie-Hellman paramaters' has security risks. But otherwise all the suggestions for ciphers are very usable and save me a lot of time.