> On 3 May 2017, at 14:53, Issac Goldstand <mar...@beamartyr.net> wrote:
> 
> On 5/3/2017 12:46 PM, Dirk-Willem van Gulik wrote:
>> On 3 May 2017, at 10:03, Issac Goldstand <mar...@beamartyr.net> wrote:
>>> 
>>> +1 on the idea
>>> 
>>> So far I'm -0 about all of the proposed implementations for 2 reasons:
>>> 
>>> 1) Mr and Mrs normal (whom are our primary customers in the original
>>> proposal) usually download Apache from their distro or some other
>>> binary.  Their Apache sources are usually not up-to-date, and in the
>>> scenario that a new vulnerability is found it would take ages to
>>> propagate to them, anyway
>>> 
>>> 2) For those users who are comfortable building their own source, they
>> ….
>> 
>> So how about ‘us’ taking the lead here. 
> 
> That's the part I was always +1 on :)
> 
>> We, here, simply define ‘one’ setting as the industry best standard - which 
>> roughly corresponds to what ssllabs their test would get you an A+ and that 
>> pretty much meets or exceeds the various NIST et.al. recommendations for key 
>> lengths for the next 5 years. 
> 
> The problem is, that we don't know what's going to be good going forward
> five years, and IMHO the best standards are shaped at least equally by
> removing "negatives" often because of high-risk vulnerabilities, as by
> adding new "positives" due to new available ciphers/tools

Right - so I think there are two things

1)      the general advice of NIST et.al. - summarized nicely at:

                https://www.keylength.com

which tells us what our `best acceptable’ choises are in any release going out 
and their likely vailidy for the next 5 years.

And then there is our response to things that become known; such as 
vulnerability - for which we have a proven update proces that is dovetailed by 
us sending mail to announce, the security mailing lists and similar outreach.

>> We’d wrap this into a simple policy document. Promise ourselfves that we’d 
>> check this every release and at least once a year review it. And have a 
>> small list of the versions currently meeting or exceeding our policy.
>> 
>> And this is the setting you get when you do ‘SSLEngine On’.
> 
> To me this doesn't address the time lags between shipping it in source,
> and it getting implemented on the machine.  I don't see it as superior
> in any way to, say, putting the recommended settings in the online docs
> and updating that from time to time - moreso when that update is in
> response to a new vulnerability.

I think we should make sure that 1) any release that goes out meets or exceeds 
industry practice (e.g. the BSI 2017 recommendation up to 2022); and 2) that we 
keep a list of versions that are still `current’ enough; and that accomodates 
what we since their release learned. Typically meaning - update to version X.Y.

Dw

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