Forums switch to chacha20-poly1305 SSL cipher (OpenSSL 1.0.2 beta3)

eva2000 · Aug 25, 2014

Third time lucky, I am testing the forum's Centmin Mod Nginx server with OpenSSL 1.02 beta3 with added chacha20-poly1305 support SSL cipher support (more info). This means that Chromium based web browsers which support chacha20-poly1305 SSL cipher will use that for the https SSL connection to this forum.

I've also switched sslspdy.com web site to using OpenSSL 1.0.2 beta3 with chacha20-poly1305 support as well for testing with ECC 256 bit ECDSA SSL certificate and signing.

The benefits of this new cipher suite include:

Better security: ChaCha20 is immune to padding-oracle attacks, such as the Lucky13, which affect CBC mode as used in TLS. By design, ChaCha20 is also immune to timing attacks. Check out a detailed description of TLS ciphersuites weaknesses in our earlier post.

Better performance: ChaCha20 and Poly1305 are very fast on mobile and wearable devices, as their designs are able to leverage common CPU instructions, including ARM vector instructions. Poly1305 also saves network bandwidth, since its output is only 16 bytes compared to HMAC-SHA1, which is 20 bytes. This represents a 16% reduction of the TLS network overhead incurred when using older ciphersuites such as RC4-SHA or AES-SHA. The expected acceleration compared to AES-GCM for various platforms is summarized in the chart below.

Click to expand...

Opera 23 and Chrome 36 users will see the following on the extended details SSL padlock.

ssllabs check

So if you experience any forum issues, let me know at Forum Feedback & Suggestions