/contrib/famzah

Enthusiasm never stops


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OpenSSH ciphers performance benchmark (update 2015)

It’s been five years since the last OpenSSH ciphers performance benchmark. There are two fundamentally new things to consider, which also gave me the incentive to redo the tests:

  • Since OpenSSH version 6.7 the default set of ciphers and MACs has been altered to remove unsafe algorithms. In particular, CBC ciphers and arcfour* are disabled by default. This has been adopted in Debian “Jessie”.
  • Modern CPUs have hardware acceleration for AES encryption.

I tested five different platforms having CPUs with and without AES hardware acceleration, different OpenSSL versions, and running on different platforms including dedicated servers, OpenVZ and AWS.

Since the processing power of each platform is different, I had to choose a criteria to normalize results, in order to be able to compare them. This was a rather confusing decision, and I hope that my conclusion is right. I chose to normalize against the “arcfour*”, “blowfish-cbc”, and “3des-cbc” speeds, because I doubt it that their implementation changed over time. They should run equally fast on each platform because they don’t benefit from the AES acceleration, nor anyone bothered to make them faster, because those ciphers are meant to be marked as obsolete for a long time.

A summary chart with the results follow:
openssh-ciphers-performance-2015-chart

You can download the raw data as an Excel file. Here is the command which was run on each server:

# uses "/root/tmp/dd.txt" as a temporary file!
for cipher in aes128-cbc aes128-ctr aes128-gcm@openssh.com aes192-cbc aes192-ctr aes256-cbc aes256-ctr aes256-gcm@openssh.com arcfour arcfour128 arcfour256 blowfish-cbc cast128-cbc chacha20-poly1305@openssh.com 3des-cbc ; do
	for i in 1 2 3 ; do
		echo
		echo "Cipher: $cipher (try $i)"
		
		dd if=/dev/zero bs=4M count=1024 2>/root/tmp/dd.txt | pv --size 4G | time -p ssh -c "$cipher" root@localhost 'cat > /dev/null'
		grep -v records /root/tmp/dd.txt
	done
done

We can draw the following conclusions:

  • Servers which run a newer CPU with AES hardware acceleration can enjoy the benefit of (1) a lot faster AES encryption using the recommended OpenSSH ciphers, and (2) some AES ciphers are now even two-times faster than the old speed champion, namely “arcfour”. I could get those great speeds only using OpenSSL 1.0.1f or newer, but this may need more testing.
  • Servers having a CPU without AES hardware acceleration still get two-times faster AES encryption with the newest OpenSSH 6.7 using OpenSSL 1.0.1k, as tested on Debian “Jessie”. Maybe they optimized something in the library.

Test results may vary (a lot) depending on your hardware platform, Linux kernel, OpenSSH and OpenSSL versions.


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Enable Forward Secrecy in Apache 2.4

The Heartbleed bug once again raised a very serious question — what happens if someone steals our SSL private key. The future actions are all clear — we revoke the key, change it on the server and we are secure. However any recorded past SSL encrypted sessions which the attacker posses can be decrypted to plain text using the stolen SSL private key.

The article “SSL: Intercepted today, decrypted tomorrow” explains the problem in great details. It also suggests who may take advantage of your stolen SSL private key.

Fortunately there is a solution to this attack vector. It is called Forward Secrecy and solves the problem by using a different private key to encrypt each new SSL session. If an attacker wanted to decrypt all your SSL sessions, the attacker would need to brute-force the private keys of each of your SSL sessions. While this attack vector still exists, current computing power is too small to solve such a task in a reasonable time. Note that Forward Secrecy is not new at all and was invented in 1992, pre-dating the SSL protocol by two years, as stated in the “SSL: Intercepted today, decrypted tomorrow” article.

Many websites and blogs recommend their own cipher list which needs to be used, in order to enable Perfect Secrecy, and at the same time to not be vulnerable to the BEAST attack. Trusting such long lists of ciphers without understanding all of them makes me a bit insecure. Luckily the OpenSSL vendors have created a special string which we can use to identify the TLS v1.2 specific ciphers — “TLSv1.2”. This makes your Apache configuration very readable and leaves the control in the OpenSSL developers who can update the ciphers accordingly:

SSLProtocol -ALL -SSLv2 +SSLv3 +TLSv1 +TLSv1.1 +TLSv1.2
SSLHonorCipherOrder on
SSLCipherSuite TLSv1.2:RC4:HIGH:!aNULL:!eNULL:!MD5
SSLCompression off

TraceEnable Off

The effect of this configuration is that for TLS v1.2 connections you will prefer the strong TLS v1.2 ciphers. For all other connections, like SSLv3 or TLS v1.0, the RC4 ciphers will be used which are required to protect against the BEAST attack. Note that TLS v1.2 does not suffer from the BEAST attack.

This configuration won’t give you Forward Secrecy for Internet Explorer. The explanation here says:
“Internet Explorer, in all versions, does not support the ECDHE and RC4 combination (which has the benefit of supporting Forward Secrecy and being resistant to BEAST). But IE has long patched the BEAST vulnerability and so we shouldn’t worry about it.”

It’s worth mentioning that using those strong TLS v1.2 ciphers may increase the CPU time required to establish a new SSL connection 3 times.


Real-time SSL test:

Resources:

Solutions: