> Zaki Akhmad wrote:

> Hi Ralf, thank you for your reply. I've done this, and it works at
> https protocol. Is it what I've done, didn't encrypt the message?
> Because the keylength is set to zero?

No. The keylength isn't set to zero. While the SSL Handshake some tasks
are done... RSA Authentication, Diffie Hellmann key agreement,
Encryption/HMAC alghoritm proposals and so on.

When you set

SSLCipherSuite RSA:!EXP:!NULL:+HIGH:-MEDIUM:-LOW (for mod_ssl)

or

SSLRequireCipher AES-SHA 3DES-SHA (or something similar for apache_ssl)

in your apache ssl section only strong encryption/authentication will be
allowed by your apache.

Additionally some information about the encryption will be exported to the
applications via environment variables. This is done by using

SSLOptions +StdEnvVars

Back to openca. Openca uses CGI scripts and when initCGI is loaded, this 
variables former exported will be evaluated and prooved. The keylength
variable of mod_ssl is called SSL_CIPHER_USEKEYSIZE (initCGI requires this
name) and as the value of this is less then 128 the session will fail.

In your case using apache-ssl this information resides in
HTTPS_SECRETKEYSIZE. SSL_CIPHER_USEKEYSIZE is thus missing and returns
zero or undef -> the session fails. But this only happens due to missing
information, not of bad encryption

So don't have fear that your ssl session is not secure, when you set
<symmetric_keylength>0</symmetric_keylength>. When you harden your apache
ssl config as mentioned above, you can see the strong encryption in your
browser.

I hope this explanation was understandable...:-)

Regards

Ralf





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