Posts tagged TLS
Disabling SSLv3 in Apache
- 29 April 2015
Yesterday I wrote a post about disabling SSLv3 in Postfix and today we take a close look at Apache. While taking a closer look at the current installation of Apache and the version shipped with Debian 8 that was released a few days back it showed that the Apache project or Debian has taken the responsibility to completely disable SSLv2. Hopefully, SSLv3 will get the same treatment soon, as broken security is worse than no security due to a false sense of security.
After a clean install on Debian Wheezy /etc/apache2/mods-available/ssl.conf contains the following entries:
Disabling SSLv3 in Postfix
- 28 April 2015
The POODLE attack was made public in late 2014 and most vendors have taken action to solve possible issues related to POODLE. The time definitely has come to close SSLv3 in all parts of the public-facing infrastructure. By default Postfix still only disallows SSLv2 and hopefully, this will change in the form of stricter default behavior in Postfix or distributions/vendors that stop shipping SSLv3 libraries.
For now, you can set with the postconf command restrictions which protocols shouldn’t be used by Postfix.
Installing SSL certificates on Debian
- 28 January 2015
Installing and configuring SSL certificates is always an issue as to how to create them and where to store them. Most of the time people can find the procedure on how to create them, but they forget all the places where they have placed them. Some initiatives exist to have centralized key stores on systems, but getting applications to use them is still a problem.
Also on Debian is this an issue and key material is all over the system if youre not careful. Some Debian developers tried to fix it, but it ended in a “stalemate” and for now, an additional package called ssl-cert exists to create self-signed certificates. This package also provides a structure for storing commercial certificates and accessing them in a safer way. We install the package ssl-cert for this.