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JonasAlfredsson / docker-nginx-certbot

Automatically create and renew website certificates for free using the Let's Encrypt certificate authority.
https://hub.docker.com/r/jonasal/nginx-certbot
MIT License
958 stars 169 forks source link

Speed up DH generation #220

Closed navjotjsingh closed 8 months ago

navjotjsingh commented 10 months ago

We can add the -dsaparam flag to the command to speed up the generation of the Diffie-Hellman parameter. It can speed up the process significantly without compromising security.

https://security.stackexchange.com/a/95184

JonasAlfredsson commented 10 months ago

Hi navjotjsingh,

Interesting find, I will look into it but if what you say is true then I don't see any issues merging this. However, what spurred this change? Are there usecases where a lot of diffie hellman parameters are generated?

navjotjsingh commented 9 months ago

I don't know of any such use cases. I suggested it just because it can greatly speed up the process.

JonasAlfredsson commented 9 months ago

I am not convinced this is the recommended setting when creating a DH parameter which will be quite static throughout the server's lifetime:

DH parameter generation with the -dsaparam option is much faster, and the recommended exponent length is shorter, which makes DH key exchange more efficient. Beware that with such DSA-style DH parameters, a fresh DH key should be created for each use to avoid small-subgroup attacks that may be possible otherwise.

OpenSSL docs

and the discussion here: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/61967

If the delay of creating these are too great to handle you can always pre-compute them on another device and copy it to the location you want.

Also: https://www.openssl.org/news/secadv/20160128.txt

JonasAlfredsson commented 8 months ago

I have been thinking about this for a while and I think we should keep the default OpenSSL behavior.

If fast dhparam creation is necessary one can follow the Mozilla recommendation and just download some parameters:

curl https://ssl-config.mozilla.org/ffdhe2048.txt > /path/to/dhparam

seems you can fetch even more from here.