Chapter 4. Planning and implementing TLS

The latest version of TLS provides the best security mechanism. Unless you have a compelling reason to include support for older versions of TLS, allow your systems to negotiate connections using at least TLS version 1.2.

Note that even though RHEL 8 supports TLS version 1.3, not all features of this protocol are fully supported by RHEL 8 components. For example, the 0-RTT (Zero Round Trip Time) feature, which reduces connection latency, is not yet fully supported by the Apache web server.

Modern, more secure cipher suites should be preferred to old, insecure ones. Always disable the use of eNULL and aNULL cipher suites, which do not offer any encryption or authentication at all. If at all possible, ciphers suites based on RC4 or HMAC-MD5, which have serious shortcomings, should also be disabled. The same applies to the so-called export cipher suites, which have been intentionally made weaker, and thus are easy to break.

While not immediately insecure, cipher suites that offer less than 128 bits of security should not be considered for their short useful life. Algorithms that use 128 bits of security or more can be expected to be unbreakable for at least several years, and are thus strongly recommended. Note that while 3DES ciphers advertise the use of 168 bits, they actually offer 112 bits of security.

Always prefer cipher suites that support (perfect) forward secrecy (PFS), which ensures the confidentiality of encrypted data even in case the server key is compromised. This rules out the fast RSA key exchange, but allows for the use of ECDHE and DHE. Of the two, ECDHE is the faster and therefore the preferred choice.

You should also prefer AEAD ciphers, such as AES-GCM, over CBC-mode ciphers as they are not vulnerable to padding oracle attacks. Additionally, in many cases, AES-GCM is faster than AES in CBC mode, especially when the hardware has cryptographic accelerators for AES.

Note also that when using the ECDHE key exchange with ECDSA certificates, the transaction is even faster than a pure RSA key exchange. To provide support for legacy clients, you can install two pairs of certificates and keys on a server: one with ECDSA keys (for new clients) and one with RSA keys (for legacy ones).

When using RSA keys, always prefer key lengths of at least 3072 bits signed by at least SHA-256, which is sufficiently large for true 128 bits of security.

The Apache HTTP Server can use both OpenSSL and NSS libraries for its TLS needs. RHEL 8 provides the mod_ssl functionality through eponymous packages:

# yum install mod_ssl

The mod_ssl package installs the /etc/httpd/conf.d/ssl.conf configuration file, which can be used to modify the TLS-related settings of the Apache HTTP Server.

Install the httpd-manual package to obtain complete documentation for the Apache HTTP Server, including TLS configuration. The directives available in the /etc/httpd/conf.d/ssl.conf configuration file are described in detail in the /usr/share/httpd/manual/mod/mod_ssl.html file. Examples of various settings are described in the /usr/share/httpd/manual/ssl/ssl_howto.html file.

When modifying the settings in the /etc/httpd/conf.d/ssl.conf configuration file, be sure to consider the following three directives at the minimum:

For example, to use only the TLS 1.2 and 1.3 protocol:

SSLProtocol             all -SSLv3 -TLSv1 -TLSv1.1

See the Configuring TLS encryption on an Apache HTTP Server chapter in the Deploying different types of servers document for more information.

To enable TLS 1.3 support in Nginx, add the TLSv1.3 value to the ssl_protocols option in the server section of the /etc/nginx/nginx.conf configuration file:

server {
    listen 443 ssl http2;
    listen [::]:443 ssl http2;
    ....
    ssl_protocols TLSv1.2 TLSv1.3;
    ssl_ciphers
    ....
}

See the Adding TLS encryption to an Nginx web server chapter in the Deploying different types of servers document for more information.

To configure your installation of the Dovecot mail server to use TLS, modify the /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-ssl.conf configuration file. You can find an explanation of some of the basic configuration directives available in that file in the /usr/share/doc/dovecot/wiki/SSL.DovecotConfiguration.txt file, which is installed along with the standard installation of Dovecot.

When modifying the settings in the /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-ssl.conf configuration file, be sure to consider the following three directives at the minimum:

For example, the following line in /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-ssl.conf allows only TLS 1.1 and later:

ssl_protocols = !SSLv2 !SSLv3 !TLSv1