Re: SSL, 'plain text' encoding, no cert

From: Hyper4S (hyper_at_4s.com)
Date: 03/10/04 

Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 09:53:55 GMT

"Paul Rubin" <http://phr.cx@NOSPAM.invalid> wrote in message
news:7xsmghqkwa.fsf@ruckus.brouhaha.com...
> That looked pretty weird to me too. SSL does support a cipher suite
> where there's no encryption (just MAC) but that suite still uses
> certificates. It's also disabled in most browsers. You have to turn
> it on through a preferences dialog if you want to use it.

You're talking about the "TLS_RSA_WITH_NULL_MD5/_SHA" ciphersuites,
providing a digest (MAC) and server authorization (by certificate) but no
encryption.

The article however is referring to the "Anonymous DH ciphersuites"
("TLS_DH_anon_..."), I guess.
Those provide encryption and digest, but no server authorization (no
certificate).

To test the "most browsers support this"-hypothese, I quickly set up an
openssl server("openssl s_server -accept 443 -nocert -www"), using no
certificates (indicated by the "-nocert" option, which restricts the
ciphersuites to the anonymous DH ones).

However, I wasnt able to connect to it, not with IE 6.0, nor with Netscape
7.1, because they had "no shared cipher".

I havent tested any other browser, but I have no reason to believe that they
would behave differently...

Grtz,

Kristof

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