Friday, June 4, 2010

How to dial up encryption so high in Apache that it breaks IE and Chrome

So you want to require strong encryption in Apache's httpd 2.0? So strong that Firefox is the only browser that can connect?
In /etc/httpd/conf.d/ssl.conf, edit the two lines as below:
SSLProtocol TLSv1
SSLCipherSuite HIGH
Then go to
/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf and edit your
<Directory> </Directory> 
to include the following line:
SSLRequire %{SSL_CIPHER_USEKEYSIZE} >= 256
Then
apachectl configtest
to check for typos.
Finally
/etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd restart

What this does is make browsers do
TLSv1 DHE-RSA-CAMELLIA256-SHA only.

You can then watch your SSL handshakes fail from IE and Chrome. If you want to require strong encryption across browsers, edit ssl.conf to look like this:

SSLProtocol TLSv1
SSLCipherSuite AES256-SHA

Then you'll have reasonably strong encryption.

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