On Sat, Jul 13, 2019 at 02:16:22PM +0100, Russell King via Exim-users wrote:

> Maybe someone can provide some hints what Key Usage should be set for an
> exim server certificate.  According to Red Hat's website:
> 
>   
> https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Certificate_System/8.0/html/Admin_Guide/Standard_X.509_v3_Certificate_Extensions.html
> 
> leads me to think that only keyEncipherment and keyAgreement need be
> set - this is what I had originally, and gnutls refused to offer any
> EC ciphers.

For RSA certs what you should have is:

    1. digitalSignature:  Allows the server to perform authenticated
                          ephemeral Diffie-Hellman key exchange, by
                          signining the key exchange messages.

    2. ?keyExcipherment:  Allows the server to use legacy RSA "key
                          transport".  This does not offer forward-
                          secrecy, and may be vulnerable to various
                          side-channel attacks when implementations
                          don't handle both good and bad keys in
                          constant time.  So best avoided, but not
                          offering RSA key transport may break
                          interoperability with very old non-PFS
                          clients.

At some point (perhaps already in the past) you'll want *just* 1, but
for now perhaps also 2.

> Adding digitalSignature and nonRepudiation to the cert seems to have
> allowed gnutls to enable EC ciphers, but I don't understand why based
> on the description above.

The nonRepudiation bit is not relevant.  TLS is not used for content
commitment (signing contracts, ...).

-- 
        Viktor.

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