Wandering Thoughts archives

2015-08-23

I think you should get your TLS configuration advice from Mozilla

If you decide that you care about having good TLS support in, say, a web server and look around, there are a lot of places that will tell you all about what configuration you should have in order to be secure and widely available and so on. Old ones live on in their dusty now-inaccuracy (TLS configuration advice has a half life of six months at most) and new ones spring up every so often. Many of them contradict each other in whole or in part. The whole thing is one of the frustrations of good TLS in practice.

Given this, I've wound up with the strong opinion that you should be getting your TLS configuration advice from the Mozilla server side TLS configuration guide. It's certainly become my primary source of configuration guidelines and I've been happy with the results.

(Other worthwhile resources are the Mozilla web server config generator and the Qualys SSL Server Test. Note that I've seen some people disagree with the SSL server test's scoring of some things.)

The advantage of Mozilla's guide isn't just that it seems to be good advice. It has two important virtues beyond that, virtues that I feel make it trustworthy. First, it's actively maintained by people who know what they're doing. Second, it's such a visible and public resource that I think any bad advice it has is very likely to produce reactions from knowledgeable outsiders. Some random person writing an article with bad TLS advice is yawn worthy; there might be a little snark on Twitter but that's probably it. Mozilla getting it wrong? You're very likely to hear a lot of noise about that.

Other TLS configuration advice may be perfectly good, well maintained, and written by people who know what they're doing (although my experience leads me to believe that it often isn't). But as an outsider it's much harder to tell if this is the case and to spot if (and when) it stops being so, which makes using the advice potentially dangerous.

web/GetTLSConfigsFromMozilla written at 00:04:12; Add Comment


Page tools: See As Normal.
Search:
Login: Password:
Atom Syndication: Recent Pages, Recent Comments.

This dinky wiki is brought to you by the Insane Hackers Guild, Python sub-branch.