1. Heartbleed Aftermath

Fortunately HCoop wasn't hit by the OpenSSL Heartbleed bug. However this perhaps is an opportunity for some spring clean up.

These reports do not look good:

• SSL Report: navajos.hcoop.net

• SSL Report: deleuze.hcoop.net

(Warning: their analyzer may need to run, and you might need to wait a while to see the actual report.)

Here's the status of navajos: it gets an F per the above SSL Labs report, because:

• Server's certificate is not trusted. Grade set to F.
• Server supports only older protocols, but not the current best TLS 1.2. Grade capped to B.
• Server does not support Forward Secrecy with the reference browsers.

Deleuze is particularly problematic, because:

• Server's certificate is not trusted. Grade set to F.

• Server supports SSL 2, which is obsolete and insecure. Grade set to F.--) Fixed

• Server is vulnerable to MITM attacks because it supports insecure renegotiation. Grade set to F.
• Server does not mitigate the CRIME attack. Grade capped to B.
• Server supports only older protocols, but not the current best TLS 1.2. Grade capped to B.
• There is no support for secure renegotiation.
• Server does not support Forward Secrecy with the reference browsers.

Since deleuze is scheduled to be decommissioned, we might want to focus on the remaining problems.

1.1. CA Certification

Problem: Browsers do not trust HCoop's self-signed certificate. Potential members might be scared away by big honking browser warnings. We might want to get a "proper" CA-signed certificate; perhaps a wildcard one. But these tend to be fairly expensive.

These are the choices at the moment, to solve the immediate problem in an inexpensive manner:

• Gandi offers one-year free CA certificate with domain registrations.

• StartSSL offers free CA certificates, but charges $25 for revocations.

1.2. Perfect Forward Secrecy

Forward Secrecy is being advocated as a solution that offers stronger protection for private keys; evidently it is straightforward to enable with Apache.

See ticket #113.