Xuelei Fan's Blog

I posted the proposal to countermeasure the BEAST attack in Bug 665814 at Bugzilla@Mozilla. For quick reference, I copy it in the blog: Xuelei Fan 2011-07-20 20:35:42 PDT  Comment 59 : One significant drawback of the current proposed countermeasure (sending empty application data packets) is that the empty packet might be rejected by the TLS peer (see comments #30/#50/others: MSIE does not accept empty fragments, Oracle application server (non-JSSE) cannot accept empty fragments, etc.) We've been looking at a slightly different countermeasure that should comply with the TLSv1.0/SSLv3.0 specifications, and likely won't break implementations. Would you please review the following proposal? If this is sound, this might avoid the empty packet issue, and the switches necessary to configure it. Looking at the spec of TLS, the block-ciphered structure is defined as: block-ciphered struct { opaque co...

The first of the Java SE 7 courses - D72697GC10 - Java SE 7 New Features Ed 1 is now on the public schedule on education.oracle.com .

The following TLS cipher suites are supported by Oracle provider, SunJSSE. These cipher suites are disabled by default because of one of the following reasons: obsoleted weak cipher suites anonymous cipher suites no encryption cipher suites (null cipher) Kerberos cipher suites Cipher suites for Kerberos (KRB5) need additional KRB5 service configuration, and these cipher suites are not common in practice. You are NOT supposed to use these cipher suites unless you really know what you're doing from a standpoint. Perference Value Description 1 0x00,0x6D TLS_DH_anon_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA256 2 0xC0,0x19 TLS_ECDH_anon_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA 3 0x00,0x3A TLS_DH_anon_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA 4 0x00,0x6C TLS_DH_anon_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256 5 0xC0,0x18 TLS_ECDH_anon_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA 6 0x00,0x34 TLS_DH_anon_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA 7 0xC0,0x16 TLS_ECDH_anon_WITH_RC4_128_SHA 8 0x00,0...

Weak cryptographic algorithms can now be disabled in Java SE 7 release. The MD2 Message-Digest Algorithm was disabled by default in Sun PKIX provider and SunJSSE provider. The MD2 algorithm is a cryptographic hash function developed by Ronald Rivest in 1989 , and was published in 1992 as an Informational RFC (RFC 1319) .; RFC 6149 moves RFC 1319/MD2 to historic status, "Since its publication, MD2 has been shown to not be collision-free, albeit successful collision attacks for properly implemented MD2 are not that damaging. Successful pre-image and second pre-image attacks against MD2 have been shown." Although MD2 is no longer considered secure, it remains in use in public key infrastructures as part of certificates generated with MD2 and RSA. An a countermeasure of the vulnerability, Java SE has disabled MD2 algorithm in certification path building and validation. You may wonder, Java SE has disabled MD2 algorithm in certification path building and validation in ...

It's a question, the answer depends on your application deployment. The browser market share in the following pie may be a fact of your consideration. From previous posts, I learned that out of the major market players, only Opera does not support ECC TLS cipher suites yet.

Source: www.oracle.com. Oracle Announces Availability of Java SE 7 , you are able to download and try Java SE 7 right now. You may also want to know Java™ SE 7 Release Security Enhancements . I may publish new post to introduce the new security features in the blog. Stay Tuned!

Perference Order Value Description 1 0xC0,0x24 TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA384 2 0xC0,0x28 TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA384 3 0x00,0x3D TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA256 4 0xC0,0x26 TLS_ECDH_ECDSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA384 5 0xC0,0x2A TLS_ECDH_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA384 6 0x00,0x6B TLS_DHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA256 7 0x00,0x6A TLS_DHE_DSS_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA256 8 0xC0,0x0A TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA 9 0xC0,0x14 TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA 10 0x00,0x35 TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA 11 0xC0,0x05 TLS_ECDH_ECDSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA 12 0xC0,0x0F TLS_ECDH_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA 13 0x00,0x39 TLS_DHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA 14 0x00,0x38 TLS_DHE_DSS_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA 15 0xC0,0x23 TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256 16 0xC0,0x27 TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_1...