[openssl-dev] Proposed cipher changes for post-1.0.2

[Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos]

On Thu, 2015-02-12 at 18:39 +0100, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:

> I absolutely support all statements of Daniel Kahn Gillmore, but
> especially that dynamism must be handled at a place that can be
> adjusted without the necessity for any recompilation.
> And i want to point to OPENSSL_config(3) which states for a longer
> time duration:
> 
>        It is strongly recommended that all new applications call
>        OPENSSL_config() or the more sophisticated functions such as
>        CONF_modules_load() during initialization (that is before starting any
>        threads). By doing this an application does not need to keep track of
>        all configuration options and some new functionality can be supported
>        automatically.
> 
> and so this finally appears to me as a natural place for such
> things.  (The next version of the MUA i maintain will, also
> finally, add support for this, for example.)
> 
> I think it was a bug report (sigh; btw., is the new EVP test still
> broken regarding "evp_test(33743) malloc: pointer being freed was
> not allocated"?) where i've expressed my own personal feelings
> about that topic, in that i think the best would be if the
> configuration file would be extended to offer the necessary
> possibilities, yet i would dramatically change the current
> semantics, for example regarding $OPENSSL_CONF, but there also
> should be an option to enable the usual Unix configuration file
> chain way of doing things ("global configuration file", "$HOME
> configuration file"), and an administrator should have the option
> to fixate some settings, possibly via a new "!" prefix to
> a variable option, as in
> 
>   # /etc/openssl.rc
>   [ciphers]
>   DEFAULT=ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384
>   !ALL=ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384
> 
> so that a user could do
> 
>   # ~/.openssl.rc
>   [ciphers]
>   DEFAULT=ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384

Some time ago, I had submitted a patch which allows administrators, but
most importantly OS distributors to set their own strings in the
configuration file, which software can then rely on, to provide a
consistent security level: https://github.com/openssl/openssl/pull/192

regards,
Nikos