Cody Richardson

Hey everyone, today we're back on cipher suites. If you want a refresher of TLS and secure cipher suites overall, check out my previous post . There are many instances in which you'll need to edit cipher suites on a system -- compliance efforts, CIS benchmarks, or simply ensuring your system doesn't use insecure suites. There are a few ways to go about this and I'll detail two of them now: IIS Crypto and the Windows registry. IIS Crypto My favorite way of editing TLS versions and cipher suites is using IIS Crypto . IIS Crypto allows you to select your desired TLS/SSL version, cipher suites, and backup the registry, all with a few mouse clicks. Only downside is that it's Windows only (even the command line version). This is what IIS Crypto will look like on an unmodified Windows 10 system. Note the separate  Server Protocols  and  Client Protocols  sections. These are important to keep straight depending on what system is listening for connections and what system is ...

  TLS As of writing (July 2021), there is really only one widely supported, secure protocol for establishing secure communications on the Internet -- TLS 1.2.  Even Microsoft which has a history of supporting legacy items (looking at you Internet Explorer) is deprecating TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1  in many of its products (and in some cases outright disabling). And just in case it wasn't clear, all versions of SSL are insecure as well. Fully updated installs of  Windows 10  and  macOS , unfortunately, still leave TLS 1.0 enabled for client and server connections. Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge dropped support for anything less than TLS 1.2 a while back now . If you're using an up-to-date version of one of those browsers you are good-to-go there (note this doesn't mean other applications on your system won't use TLS 1.0/1.1). Vendors are currently working on adoption and I hope that very soon TLS 1.3 will replace TLS 1.2. Cloudflare has a fantastic blog post ...