Tomcat has been one of my favorite pieces of software for about a decade. Thanks to all your generous contributions it just keeps getting better! I appreciate the focus on security in Tomcat 8.
Suggestion: ========= Instead of specifying allowed ciphers in the Connector node of server.xml, I'd like to specify dis-allowed/excluced ciphers so that as new, better cipher suites become available we won't have to do anything. Maybe an "excludeCiphers" attribute? Background: ========= We're getting an 'A' on the Qualys TLS test with stand-alone Tomcat, which is pretty cool: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/index.html Mostly, that's because of the following settings (in case this helps anyone): <Connector port="8443" protocol="org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11NioProtocol" maxThreads="150" SSLEnabled="true" scheme="https" secure="true" clientAuth="false" sslEnabledProtocols="TLSv1,TLSv1.1,TLSv1.2" compression="on" disableUploadTimeout="true" connectionTimeout="180000" URIEncoding="UTF-8" keystorePass="notTheRealPassword" ciphers="TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256, TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256, TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA, TLS_DHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256, TLS_DHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256, TLS_DHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA, TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_3DES_EDE_CBC_SHA, TLS_DHE_RSA_WITH_3DES_EDE_CBC_SHA" /> It seems like just a few years ago there were about 50 cipher suites to choose from. Now there are 12 that work with TLS. Eight of those have Forward Security (the 8 listed above). Presumably those eight will also become outdated over time and new ones will be added to replace them. The problem with specifying ciphers as above is that someone will have to know when and how to manually update the cipher list. With each upgrade of Java, we need to remember to do something like the following: - Delete the ciphers attribute - Restart tomcat - Test here: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/index.html - Copy the list of cipher suites - Delete any that don't support Forward Security - Make a new ciphers attribute. - Verify that the browsers and devices we support will still work. To be honest, I'm not sure if that needs to be done with each Java patch release, or only when Java 9 comes out. If instead of specifying valid ciphers, I specified invalid ones, then the new ones would just flow through the system and become available without me doing anything! Thank you in advance for considering this suggestion. @GlenKPeterson --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@tomcat.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@tomcat.apache.org
