Security defaults

[Brent Putman]

On 5/20/14 7:52 AM, Cantor, Scott wrote:
> I don't recall documenting it, and it's now not really expressed in the
> configuration, it's usually a library default.
>
> The list is just MD5, RSA-MD5, and PKCS 1.5.

Ok, thanks.  That's pretty much what we have now in the new Java code.


>
> SHA-2 in any form 	OpenSSL >= 0.9.7
> ECDSA			Santuario >= 1.7 and OpenSSL >= 0.9.8 (I think)
> GCM			Santuario >= 1.7 and OpenSSL >= 1.0.1
> RSA-OAEP 1.1		Santuario >= 1.7 and OpenSSL >= 0.9.7
>
> ECDSA is also commonly missing from vendor builds of OpenSSL until
> recently due to the patents around it. I believe Red Hat turned it on
> finally because people are demanding new cipher suites in TLS for forward
> secrecy that require ECDH and ephemeral keying, so it enables ECDSA as a
> side effect.


Ok.  I was mainly trying to get a sense of whether any of the newer
stuff would actually be usable with the SP.  And what deployment issues
we get into when people start trying to turn this stuff on.

So it sounds like, except for possibly ECDSA, that all of the above is
usable on RHEL 6.x +.  And most of it (not GCM) is available on RHEL 5.x
versions as well (if I'm remembering the openssl versions correctly).


> I knew about GCM, I didn't realize they added OAEP 1.1 to Java 8 though.


Well, out of the box it fundamentally loads the relevant transform,
which is "RSA/ECB/OAEPPadding". That's as far as I've gotten.  I haven't
done more comprehensive testing to see if that actually fully works. 
I'll do that soon.

I was also poking around in Santuario.  Off-hand looks like in XMLCipher
they do have support for OAEP 1.1, including user-specified digest, MGF
and OAEPParams byte[].  To make use of that, at least configurably, I'll
have to update our Encrypter, as well as the config, resolver and params
stuff to be able to represent that info and carry it around.  But looks
doable without too much work.  I just need to read up on it more first.