Re: ssl-enum-ciphers question

Daniel Miller <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.security.nmap.devel
Message-ID <CABmvJnM7HahyC4GWG7XoHTvTh7=tPHEXiUGSFLXOKTuP3inBzw@mail.gmail.com>
Robin,

One of the ciphers supported uses an Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) key
exchange. In this case, ssl-enum-ciphers offers all published ECC curves
and lets the server pick one. The server picked the "secp256r1" curve,
which is a 256-bit curve having an equivalent strength to 3072-bit RSA. The
server's certificate has a key strength that is greater than 3072-bit RSA.
This could be 4096-bit RSA or 384-bit ECC. The intent of the warning is to
identify servers that are configured to negotiate a weaker connection than
the certificate is capable of.

This reminds me that we do not currently have a way of enumerating all the
ECC curves that a server supports. This would be an interesting data set
and could also show a weakness in cipher strength, since named curves go
all the way down to 1024-bit equivalent strength, and custom curves can be
512-bit or weaker.

Dan

On Wed, Apr 5, 2017 at 4:55 PM, Robin Wood <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi
> Can anyone explain what this output from the ssl-enum-ciphers script means?
>
> |       Key exchange (secp256r1) of lower strength than certificate key
>
> Thanks
>
> Robin
>
> _______________________________________________
> Sent through the dev mailing list
> https://nmap.org/mailman/listinfo/dev
> Archived at http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/
>

_______________________________________________
Sent through the dev mailing list
https://nmap.org/mailman/listinfo/dev
Archived at http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/
lmpx.com only provides a reader for public news (NNTP) servers. It is not affiliated with the servers or forums shown here and is not responsible for the content of articles, which is written by their respective authors.