Issue #6663 has been updated by Patrick Mohr.

I'm curious why the priority on this was dropped.  People have said advantages 
for it, but I have yet to hear a problem.  This is also security related, and 
leaving this in, is a tacit statement from Puppet Labs that 1024 bits is safe 
enough about 6 years from now.  (That's 5 years for the cert to expire, and 1 
year for the patch to get written, released, and sent downstream to the faster 
updating repositories)


Do we really want to recommend users keep using this 8 years (2012+6 years) 
after the NIST recommends we stop, considering that the ability to force a cert 
will basically invalidate the whole puppet security model?[1]  I don't see this 
as critical, but I also think, this should be urgent.


[1] Impersonating any computer, as a client will usually give you access to 
sensitive information, and allow fact injection that might cause problems other 
security problems.  It also allows anyone who can hijack DNS or do a 
man-in-the-middle attack to gain root access to most puppet clients.
----------------------------------------
Bug #6663: puppet.conf says keylength defaults to 1024 -- should be 2048
https://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/6663

Author: micah -
Status: Accepted
Priority: Normal
Assignee: 
Category: SSL
Target version: 2.7.x
Affected Puppet version: 
Keywords: 
Branch: 
https://github.com/jamtur01/puppet/commit/b929aa19330bab42421190e60099ac2406f975c3


puppet.conf(5) says that the keylength parameter defaults to 1024 bits for new 
RSA keys.

It should default to 2048, not 1024, there are a number of reasons for this:

* many free software crypto tools are defaulting to 2048-bit keys now
  (e.g. OpenSSH, GnuPG)

* NIST has recommended avoiding reliance on 1024-bit keys after the
  end of 2010

* you can compare other comparable standards at http://keylength.com/

Considering that generated certificates are expected to be around for at least 
the lifetime of the server itself, setting a reasonable bit-length key from the 
beginning is pretty important, especially if the server might be expected to be 
around for some years from now... 

You might argue that this is a feature request, but I would like to pre-empt 
that argument. Now that we are well beyond the NIST recommendation, this is a 
bug now days.


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