This guide arose out of the need for system administrators to have an updated, solid, well researched and thought-through guide for configuring SSL, PGP, SSH and other cryptographic tools in the post-Snowden age. Triggered by the NSA leaks in the summer of 2013, many system administrators and IT security officers saw the need to strengthen their encryption settings. This guide is specifically written for these system administrators.

As Schneier noted in [Sch13a], it seems that intelligence agencies and adversaries on the Internet are not breaking so much the mathematics of encryption per se, but rather use software and hardware weaknesses, subvert standardization processes, plant backdoors, rig random number generators and most of all exploit careless settings in server configurations and encryption systems to listen in on private communications. Worst of all, most communication on the internet is not encrypted at all by default (for SMTP, opportunistic TLS would be a solution).

This guide can only address one aspect of securing our information systems: getting the crypto settings right to the best of the authors’ current knowledge. Other attacks, as the above mentioned, require di ffrent protection schemes which are not covered in this guide. This guide is not an introduction to cryptography. For background information on cryptography and cryptoanalysis we would like to refer the reader to the references in appendix B and C at the end of this document.

The focus of this guide is merely to give current best practices for configuring complex cipher suites and related parameters in a copy & paste-able manner. The guide tries to stay as concise as is possible for such a complex topic as cryptography. Naturally, it can not be complete. There are many excellent guides [ IS12, fSid IB13, EN I13] and best practice documents available when it comes to cryptography. However none of them focuses specifically on what an average system administrator needs for hardening his or her systems’ crypto settings.

This guide tries to fill this gap.