[Dovecot] dovecot and PFS

Emmanuel Dreyfus manu at netbsd.org
Tue Sep 10 10:54:50 EEST 2013


Hi

Is there known advices on how to favor PFS with dovecot? 

In Apache, I use the following directives, with cause all modern 
browsers to adopt 256 bit PFS ciphers, while keeping backward 
compatibility with older browsers and avoiding BEAST attack:
SSLProtocol all -SSLv2
SSLHonorCipherOrder On
SSLCipherSuite ECDHE at STRENGTH:ECDH at STRENGTH:DH at STRENGTH:HIGH:-SSLv3-SHA1:-TLSv10
-SHA1:RC4:!MD5:!DES:!aNULL:!eNULL

dovecot does not care about BEAST, since attacker cannot inject 
trafic. Therefore the cipher list get simplier in dovecot.conf:
ssl_cipher_list = ECDHE at STRENGTH:ECDH at STRENGTH:DH at STRENGTH:HIGH:!MD5:!DES:!aNULL
:!eNULL

But that list is good for browsers. I am not aware of documentation
about what ciphers are advertised by various mail client. How can I 
know if that setting has some success pushing PFS? How can I 
discover which clients fail to negociate PFS ciphers?


-- 
Emmanuel Dreyfus
manu at netbsd.org


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