Happy 20th Birthday, BIG-IP TMOS!
I wasn’t in the waiting room with the F5 family, ears and eyes perked for the release announcement of BIG-IP version 9.0. I was a customer back in 2004, working on a government contract at Scott AFB, Illinois. I shared ownership of the F5 infrastructure, pairs of BIG-IPs running version 4.5 on Dell PowerEdge 2250 servers with one other guy. But maybe a month or two before the official first release of TMOS, my F5 account manager dropped off some shiny new hardware. And it was legit purpose-built and snazzy, not some garage-style hacked Frankenstein of COTS parts like the earlier stuff. And you wonder why we chose Dell servers! Anyway, I was a hard-core network engineer at this time, with very little exposure to anything above layer four, and even there, my understanding was limited to ports and ACLs and maybe a little high-level clarity around transport protocols. But application protocols? Nah. No idea. So with this new hardware and an entirely new full-proxy architecture (what’s a proxy, again?) I was overwhelmed. And honestly, I was frustrated with it for the first few days because I didn’t know what I didn’t know and so I struggled to figure out what to do with it, even to replicate my half-proxy configuration in the “new way”. But I’m a curious person. Given enough time and caffeine, I can usually get to the bottom of a problem, at least well enough to arrive at a workable solution. And so I did. My typical approach to anything is to make it work, make it work better, make it work reliably better, then finally make it work reliably and more performantly better. And the beauty here with this new TMOS system is that I was armed with a treasure trove of new toys. The short list I dug into during my beta trial, which lasted for a couple of weeks: The concept of a profile. When you support a few applications, this is no big deal. When you support hundreds, being able to macro configuration snippets within your application and across applications was revolutionary. Not just for the final solution, but also for setting up and executing your test plans. iRules. Yes, technically they existed in 4.x, but they were very limited in scope. With TMOS, F5 introduced the Tcl-based and F5 extended live-traffic scripting environment that unleashed tremendous power and flexibility for network and application teams. I dabbled with this, and thought I understood exactly how useful this was. More on this a little later. A host operating system. I was a router, switch, and firewall guy. Nothing I worked on had this capability. I mean, a linux system built in to my networking device? YES!!! Two things I never knew I always needed during my trial: 1) tcpdump ON BOX. Seriously--mind blown; and 2) perl scripting against config and snmp. Yeah, I know, I laugh about perl now. But 20 years ago, it was the cats pajamas. A fortunate job change Shortly after my trial was over, I interviewed for an accepted a job offer from a major rental car company that was looking to hire an engineer to redesign their application load balancing infrastructure and select the next gear purchase for the effort. We evaluated Cisco, Nortel/Alteon, Radware, and F5 on my recommendation. With our team’s resident architect we drafted the rubric with which we’d evaluate all the products, and whereas there were some layer two performance issues in some packet sizes that were arguably less than real-world, the BIG-IP blew away the competitors across the board. Particularly, though, in configurability and instrumentation. Tcpdump on box was such a game-changer for us. Did we have issues with TMOS version 9? For sure. My first year with TMOS was also TMOS's first year. Bugs are going to happen with any release, but a brand new thing is guaranteed. But F5 support was awesome, and we worked through all the issues in due time. Anyway, I want to share three wins in my first year with TMOS. Win #1 Our first production rollout was in the internet space, on BIG-IP version 9.0.5. That’s right, a .0 release. TMOS was a brand new baby, and we had great confidence throughout our testing. During our maintenance, once we flipped over the BIG-IPs, our rental transaction monitors all turned red and the scripted rental process had increased by 50%! Not good. “What is this F5 stuff? Send it back!!” But it was new, and we knew we had a gem here. We took packet captures on box, of course, then rolled back and took more packet captures, this time through taps because our old stuff didn’t have tcpdump on box. This is where Jason started to really learn about the implications of both a full proxy architecture and the TCP protocol. It turns our our application servers had a highly-tuned TCP stack on them specific to the characteristics of the rental application. We didn’t know this, of course. But since we implemented a proxy that terminates clients at the BIG-IP and starts a new session to the servers, all those customizations for WAN traffic were lost. Once we built a TCP profile specifically for the rental application servers and tested it under WAN emulation, we not only reached parity with the prior performance but beat it by 10%. Huzzah! Go BIG-IP custom protocol stack configuration! Win #2 For the next internal project, I had to rearchitect the terminal server farm. We had over 700 servers in two datacenters supporting over 60,000 thin clients around the world for rental terminals. Any failures meant paper tickets and unhappy staff and customers. One thing that was problematic with the existing solution is that sometimes clients would detach and upon reconnect would connect directly to the server, which skewed the load balancers view of the world and frequently overloaded some servers to the point all sessions on that server would hang until metrics (but usually angry staff) would notify. Remember my iRules comment earlier on differentiators? Well, iRules architect David Hansen happened to be a community hero and was very helpful to me in the DevCentral forums and really opened my eyes to the art of possible with iRules. He was able to take the RDP session token that was being returned by the client, read it, translate it from its Microsoft encoding format, and then forward the session on to the correct server in the backend so that all sessions continued to be accounted for in our load balancing tier. This was formative for me as a technologist and as a member of the DevCentral community. Win #3 2004-2005 was the era before security patching was as visible a responsibility as it is today, but even then we had a process and concerns when there were obstacles. We had an internal application that had a plugin for the web tier that managed all the sessions to the app tier, and this plugin was no longer supported. We were almost a year behind on system and application patches because we had no replacement for this. Enter, again, iRules.I was able to rebuild the logic of the plugin in an iRule that IIRCwasn’tmore than 30 lines. So the benefits ended up not only being a solution to that problem, but the ability to remove that web tier altogether, saving on equipment, power, and complexity costs. And that was just the beginning... TMOS was mature upon arrival, but it got better every year. iControl added REST-based API access; clustered multi-processing introduced tremendous performance gains; TMOS got virtualized, and all the home-lab technologists shouted with joy; a plugin architecture allowed for product modules like ASM and APM; solutions that began as iRules like AFM and SSLO became products. It’s crazy how much innovation has taken place on this platform! The introduction of TMOS didn’t just introduce me to applications and programmability. It did that and I’m grateful, but it did so much more. It unlocked in me that fanboy level that fans of sports teams, video game platforms, Taylor Swift, etc, experience. It helped me build an online community at DevCentral, long before I was an employee. Happy 20th Birthday, TMOS! We celebrate and salute you!
iHealth Upgrade Advisor: Making upgrades a little easier
Whether it is upgrading the firmware on a switch, the OS on a server, an important business application or the software on a BIG-IP, performing upgrades is something that makes almost all IT Admins and Network Engineers nervous. We’ve learned from (sometimes painful) experience that things don’t always go as planned. Good preparation greatly increases the likelihood that an upgrade will be successful, which is why F5 has created the iHealth Upgrade Advisor. Its goal is to provide an additional service from F5 that will complement your existing upgrade preparations, increasing the predictability of the upgrade while reducing your upgrade time. The iHealth Upgrade Advisor service provides a way for users to gain insight into potential issues with a BIG-IP upgrade before they attempt the upgrade. It provides guidance that is specific to a BIG-IP based on its configuration, the version of software it is currently running and the version you are planning to upgrade to. When an issue can be avoided by making a configuration change prior to upgrading, the Upgrade Advisor will tell you exactly what to change. For some issues, it will list the corrective actions to take after the upgrade. Demo Video This short video demonstrating the Upgrade Advisor shows you how to use it and some examples of the guidance it provides. Accessing the Upgrade Advisor The next time you are preparing to upgrade a BIG-IP, login to ihealth.f5.com, upload a .qkview file from that BIG-IP and then view the qkview after iHealth has analyzed it. The Upgrade Advisor can be accessed by clicking on its tab in the left-hand menu. Simply select the version of BIG-IP you are planning to upgrade to in the advisor and review the results. Here is a screenshot of the Upgrade Advisor: Give it a Try Try out the F5 upgrade Advisor today and let us know what you think using the feedback option (circled in red on the right side of the screenshot above).SNI Routing with BIG-IP
In the previous article, The Three HTTP Routing Patterns, Lori MacVittie covers 3 methods of routing. Today we will look at Server Name Indication (SNI) routing as an additional method of routing HTTPS or any protocol that uses TLS and SNI. Using SNI we can route traffic to a destination without having to terminate the SSL connection. This enables several benefits including: Reduced number of Public IPs Simplified configuration More intelligent routing of TLS traffic Terminating SSL Connections When you havea SSL certificate and key you can perform the cryptographic actions required to encrypt traffic using TLS. This is what I refer to as “terminating the SSL connection” throughout this article. When you want to route traffic this is a chickenand an egg problem, becausefor TLS traffic you want to be able to route the traffic by being able to inspect the contents, but this normally requires being able to “terminate the SSL connection”. The goal of this article is to layer in traffic routing for TLS traffic without having to require having/knowing the original SSL certificate and key. Server Name Indication (SNI) SNI is a TLS extension that makes it possible to "share" certificates on a single IP address. This is possible due to a client using a TLS extension that requests a specific name before the server responds with a SSL certificate. Prior to SNI, the other options would be a wildcard certificate or Subject Alternative Name (SAN) that allows you to specify multiple names with a single certificate. SNI with Virtual Servers It has been possible to use SNI on F5 BIG-IP since TMOS 11.3.0. The following KB13452 outlines how it can be configured. In this scenario (from the KB article) the BIG-IP is terminating the SSL connection. Not all clients support SNI and you will always need to specify a “fallback” profile that will be used if a SNI name is not used or matched. The next example will look at how to use SNI without terminating the SSL connection. SNI Routing Occasionally you may have the need to have a hybrid configuration of terminating SSL connections on the BIG-IP and sending connections without terminating SSL. One method is to create two separate virtual servers, one for SSL connections that the BIG-IP will handle (using clientssl profile) and one that it will not handle SSL (just TCP). This works OK for a small number of backends, but does not scale well if you have many backends (run out of Public IP addresses). Using SNI Routing we can handle everything on a single virtual server / Public IP address. There are 3 methods for performing SNI Routing with BIG-IP iRule with binary scan a. Article by Colin Walker code attribute to Joel Moses b. Code Share by Stanislas Piron iRule with SSL::extensions Local Traffic Policy Option #1 is for folks that prefer complete control of the TLS protocol. It only requires the use of a TCP profile. Options #2 and #3 only require the use of a SSL persistence profile and TCP profile. SNI Routing with Local Traffic Policy We will skip option #1 and #2 in this article and look at using a Local Traffic Policy for SNI Routing. For a review of Local Traffic Policies check out the following DevCentral articles: LTM Policy Jan 2015 Simplifying Local Traffic Policies in BIG-IP 12.1 June 2016 In previous articles about Local Traffic Policiesthe focus was on routing HTTP traffic, but today we will use it to route SSL connections using SNI. In the following example, using a Local Traffic Policy named “sni_routing”, we are setting a condition on the SSL Extension “servername” and sending the traffic to a pool without terminating the SSL connection. The pool member could be another server or another BIG-IP device. The next example will forward the traffic to another virtual server that is configured with a clientssl profile. This uses VIP targeting to send traffic to another virtual server on the same device. In both examples it is important to note that the “condition”/“action” has been changed from occurring on “request” (that maps to a HTTP L7 request) to “ssl client hello”. By performing the action prior to any L7 functions occurring, we can forward the traffic without terminating the SSL connection. The previous example policy, “sni_routing”, can be attached to a Virtual Server that only has a TCP profile and SSL persistence profile. No HTTP or clientssl profile is required! This method can also be used to solve the issue of how to consolidate multiple SSL virtual servers behind a single virtual server that have different APM and/or ASM policies. This is similar to the architecture that is used by the Container Connector for Cloud Foundry; in creating a two-tier load balancing solution on a single device. Routed Correctly? TLS 1.3 has interesting proposals on how to obscure the servername (TLS in TLS?), but for now this is a useful and practical method of handling multiple SSL certs on a single IP. In the future this may still be possible as well with TLS 1.3. For example the use of a HTTP Fronting service could be a tier 1 virtual server (this is just my personal speculation, I have not tried, at the time of publishing this was still a draft proposal). In other news it has been demonstrated that a combination of using SNI and a different host header can be used for “domain fronting”. A method to enforce consistent policy (prevent domain fronting) would be to layer in additional conditions that match requested SNI servername (TLS extension) with requested HOST header (L7 HTTP header). This would help enforce that a tenant is using a certificate that is associated with their application and not “borrowing” the name and certificate that is being used by an adjacent service. We don’t think of a TLS extension as an attribute that can be used to route application traffic, but it is useful and possible on BIG-IP.Cipher Suite Practices and Pitfalls
Cipher Suite Practices and Pitfalls It seems like every time you turn around there is a new vulnerability to deal with, and some of them, such as Sweet32, have required altering cipher configurations for mitigation. Still other users may tweak their cipher suite settings to meet requirements for PCI compliance, regulatory issues, local compatibility needs, etc. However, once you start modifying your cipher suite settings you must take great care, as it is very easy to shoot yourself in the foot. Many misconfigurations will silently fail – seeming to achieve the intended result while opening up new, even worse, vulnerabilities. Let's take a look at cipher configuration on the F5 BIG-IP products to try stay on the safe path. What is a Cipher Suite? Before we talk about how they're configured, let's define exactly what we mean by 'cipher suite', how it differs from just a 'cipher', and the components of the suite. Wikipedia had a good summary, so rather than reinvent the wheel: A cipher suite is a named combination of authentication, encryption, message authentication code (MAC) and key exchange algorithms used to negotiate the security settings for a network connection using the Transport Layer Security (TLS) / Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) network protocol. When we talk about configuring ciphers on BIG-IP we're really talking about configuring cipher suites. More specifically the configured list of cipher suites is a menu of options available to be negotiated. Each cipher suite specifies the key exchange algorithm, authentication algorithm, cipher, cipher mode, and MAC that will be used. I recommend reading K15194: Overview of the BIG-IP SSL/TLS cipher suite for more information. But as a quick overview, let's look at a couple of example cipher suites. The cipher suite is in the format: Key Exchange-Authentication-Cipher-Cipher Mode-MAC Note that not all of these components may be explicitly present in the cipher suite, but they are still implicitly part of the suite. Let's consider this cipher suite: ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 This breaks down as follows: Key Exchange Algorithm: ECDHE (Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman Ephemeral) Authentication Algorithm: RSA Cipher: AES256 (aka AES with a 256-bit key) Cipher Mode: GCM (Galois/Counter Mode) MAC: SHA384 (aka SHA-2 (Secure Hash Algorithm 2) with 384-bit hash) This is arguably the strongest cipher suite we have on BIG-IP at this time. Let's compare that to a simpler cipher suite: AES128-SHA Key Exchange Algorithm: RSA (Implied) – When it isn't specified, presume RSA. Authentication Algorithm: RSA (Implied) – When it isn't specified, presume RSA. Cipher: AES128 (aka AES with a 128-bit key) Cipher Mode: CBC (Cipher Block Chaining) (Implied) – When it isn't specified, presume CBC. MAC: SHA1 (Secure Hash Algorithm 1; SHA-1 always produces a 160-bit hash.) This example illustrates that the cipher suite may not always explicitly specify every parameter, but they're still there. There are 'default' values that are fairly safe to presume when not otherwise specified. If an algorithm isn't specified, it is RSA. That's a safe bet. And if a cipher mode isn't specified it is CBC. Always CBC. Note that all ciphers currently supported on BIG-IP are CBC mode except for AES-GCM and RC4. ALL. I stress this as it has been a recurring source of confusion amongst customers. It isn't only the cipher suites which explicitly state 'CBC' in their name. Let's examine each of these components. This article is primarily about cipher suite configuration and ciphers, and not the SSL/TLS protocol, so I won't dive too deeply here, but I think it helps to have a basic understanding. Forgive me if I simplify a bit. Key Exchange Algorithms As a quick review of the difference between asymmetric key (aka public key) cryptography and symmetric key cryptography: With the asymmetric key you have two keys – K public and K private –which have a mathematical relationship. Since you can openly share the public key there is no need to pre-share keys with anyone. The downside is that these algorithms are computationally expensive. Key lengths for a common algorithm such as RSA are at least 1024-bit, and 2048-bit is really the minimally acceptable these days. Symmetric key has only K private . Both ends use the same key, which poses the problem of key distribution. The advantage is higher computational performance and common key sizes are 128-bit or 256-bit. SSL/TLS, of course, uses both public and private key systems – the Key Exchange Algorithm is the public key system used to exchange the symmetric key. Examples you'll see in cipher suites include ECDHE, DHE, RSA, ECDH, and ADH. Authentication Algorithms The Authentication Algorithm is sometimes grouped in with the Key Exchange Algorithm for configuration purposes; 'ECDHE_RSA' for example. But we'll consider it as a separate component. This is the algorithm used in the SSL/TLS handshake for the server to sign (using the server's private key) elements sent to the client in the negotiation. The client can authenticate them using the server's public key. Examples include: RSA, ECDSA, DSS (aka DSA), and Anonymous. Anonymous means no authentication; this is generally bad. The most common way users run into this is by accidentally enabling an 'ADH' cipher suite. More on this later when we talk about pitfalls. Note that when RSA is used for the key exchange, authentication is inherent to the scheme so there really isn't a separate authentication step. However, most tools will list it out for completeness. Cipher To borrow once again from Wikipedia: In cryptography, a cipher (or cypher) is an algorithm for performing encryption or decryption—a series of well-defined steps that can be followed as a procedure. An alternative, less common term is encipherment. To encipher or encode is to convert information into cipher or code. In common parlance, 'cipher' is synonymous with 'code', as they are both a set of steps that encrypt a message; however, the concepts are distinct in cryptography, especially classical cryptography. This is what most of us mean when we refer to 'configuring ciphers'. We're primarily interested in controlling the cipher used to protect our information through encryption. There are many, many examples of ciphers which you may be familiar with: DES (Data Encryption Standard), 3DES (Triple DES), AES (Advanced Encryption Standard), RC4 (Rivest Cipher 4), Camellia, RC6, RC2, Blowfish, Twofish, IDEA, SEED, GOST, Rijndael, Serpent, MARS, etc. For a little cipher humor, I recommend RFC2410: The NULL Encryption Algorithm and Its Use With IPsec. Roughly speaking, ciphers come in two types – block ciphers and stream ciphers. Block Ciphers Block ciphers operate on fixed-length chunks of data, or blocks. For example, DES operates on 64-bit blocks while AES operates on 128-bit blocks. Most of the ciphers you'll encounter are block ciphers. Examples: DES, 3DES, AES, Blowfish, Twofish, etc. Stream Ciphers Stream ciphers mathematically operate on each bit in the data flow individually. The most commonly encountered stream cipher is RC4, and that's deprecated. So we're generally focused on block ciphers, not that it really changes anything for the purposes of this article. All of the secrecy in encryption comes from the key that is used, not the cipher itself. Obtain the key and you can unlock the ciphertext. The cipher itself – the algorithm, source code, etc. – not only can be, but should be, openly available. History is full of examples of private cryptosystems failing due to weaknesses missed by their creators, while the most trusted ciphers were created via open processes (AES for example). Keys are of varying lengths and, generally speaking, the longer the key the more secure the encryption. DES only had 56-bits of key data, and thus is considered insecure. We label 3DES as 168-bit, but it is really only equivalent to 112-bit strength. (More on this later.) Newer ciphers, such as AES, often offer options – 128-bits, 192-bits, or 256-bits of key. Remember, a 256-bit key is far more than twice as strong as a 128-bit key. It is 2 128 vs. 2 256 - 3.4028237e+38 vs. 1.1579209e+77 Cipher Mode Cipher mode is the mode of operation used by the cipher when encrypting plaintext into ciphertext, or decrypting ciphertext into plaintext. The most common mode is CBC – Cipher Block Chaining. In cipher block chaining the ciphertext from block n feeds into the process for block n+1 – the blocks are chained together. To steal borrow an image from Wikipedia: As I mentioned previously, all ciphers on BIG-IP are CBC mode except for RC4 (the lone stream cipher, disabled by default starting in 11.6.0) and AES-GCM. AES-GCM was first introduced in 11.5.0, and it is only available for TLSv1.2 connections. GCM stands for Galois/Counter Mode, a more advanced mode of operation than CBC. In GCM the blocks are not chained together. GCM runs in an Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) mode which eliminates the separate per-message hashing step, therefore it can achieve higher performance than CBC mode on a given HW platform. It is also immune to classes of attack that have harried CBC, such as the numerous padding attacks (BEAST, Lucky 13, etc.) Via Wikipedia: The main drawback to AES-GCM is that it was only added in TLSv1.2, so any older clients which don't support TLSv1.2 cannot use it. There are other cipher suites officially supported in TLS which have other modes, but F5 does not currently support those ciphers so we won't get too deep into that. Other ciphers include AES-CCM (CTR mode with a CBC MAC; CTR is Counter Mode), CAMELLIA-GCM (CAMELLIA as introduced in 12.0.0 is CBC), and GOST CNT (aka CTR). We may see these in the future. MAC aka Hash Function What did we ever do before Wikipedia? A hash function is any function that can be used to map data of arbitrary size to data of fixed size. The values returned by a hash function are called hash values, hash codes, digests, or simply hashes. One use is a data structure called a hash table, widely used in computer software for rapid data lookup. Hash functions accelerate table or database lookup by detecting duplicated records in a large file. An example is finding similar stretches in DNA sequences. They are also useful in cryptography. A cryptographic hash function allows one to easily verify that some input data maps to a given hash value, but if the input data is unknown, it is deliberately difficult to reconstruct it (or equivalent alternatives) by knowing the stored hash value. This is used for assuring integrity of transmitted data, and is the building block for HMACs, which provide message authentication. In short, the MAC provides message integrity. Hash functions include MD5, SHA-1 (aka SHA), SHA-2 (aka SHA128, SHA256, & SHA384), and AEAD (Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data). MD5 has long since been rendered completely insecure and is deprecated. SHA-1 is now being 'shamed', if not blocked, by browsers as it is falling victim to advances in cryptographic attacks. While some may need to continue to support SHA-1 cipher suites for legacy clients, it is encouraged to migrate to SHA-2 as soon as possible – especially for digital certificates. Configuring Cipher Suites on BIG-IP Now that we've covered what cipher suites are, let's look at where we use them. There are two distinct and separate areas where cipher suites are used – the host, or control plane, and TMM, or the data plane. On the host side SSL/TLS is handled by OpenSSL and the configuration follows the standard OpenSSL configuration options. Control Plane The primary use of SSL/TLS on the control plane is for httpd. To see the currently configured cipher suite, use ' tmsh list sys http ssl-ciphersuite '. The defaults may vary depending on the version of TMOS. For example, these were the defaults in 12.0.0: tmsh list sys http ssl-ciphersuite sys httpd { ssl-ciphersuite DEFAULT:!aNULL:!eNULL:!LOW:!RC4:!MD5:!EXP } As of 12.1.2 these have been updated to a more explicit list: tmsh list sys http ssl-ciphersuite sys httpd { ssl-ciphersuite ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA384:AES128-GCM-SHA256:AES256-GCM-SHA384:AES128-SHA:AES256-SHA:AES128-SHA256:AES256-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-DES-CBC3-SHA:DES-CBC3-SHA } You can change this configuration via ' tmsh modify sys http ssl-ciphersuite <value> '. One important thing to note is that the default is not just 'DEFAULT' as it is on the data plane. This is one thing that users have been caught by; thinking that setting the keyword to 'DEFAULT' will reset the configuration. As OpenSSL provides SSL/TLS support for the control plane, if you want to see which ciphers will actually be supported you can use ' openssl ciphers -v <cipherstring> '. For example: openssl ciphers -v 'ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA384:AES128-GCM-SHA256:AES256-GCM-SHA384:AES128-SHA:AES256-SHA:AES128-SHA256:AES256-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-DES-CBC3-SHA:DES-CBC3-SHA' ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 TLSv1.2 Kx=ECDH Au=RSA Enc=AESGCM(128) Mac=AEAD ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 TLSv1.2 Kx=ECDH Au=RSA Enc=AESGCM(256) Mac=AEAD ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA SSLv3 Kx=ECDH Au=RSA Enc=AES(128) Mac=SHA1 ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA SSLv3 Kx=ECDH Au=RSA Enc=AES(256) Mac=SHA1 ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256 TLSv1.2 Kx=ECDH Au=RSA Enc=AES(128) Mac=SHA256 ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384 TLSv1.2 Kx=ECDH Au=RSA Enc=AES(256) Mac=SHA384 ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 TLSv1.2 Kx=ECDH Au=ECDSA Enc=AESGCM(128) Mac=AEAD ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 TLSv1.2 Kx=ECDH Au=ECDSA Enc=AESGCM(256) Mac=AEAD ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA SSLv3 Kx=ECDH Au=ECDSA Enc=AES(128) Mac=SHA1 ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA SSLv3 Kx=ECDH Au=ECDSA Enc=AES(256) Mac=SHA1 ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA256 TLSv1.2 Kx=ECDH Au=ECDSA Enc=AES(128) Mac=SHA256 ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA384 TLSv1.2 Kx=ECDH Au=ECDSA Enc=AES(256) Mac=SHA384 AES128-GCM-SHA256 TLSv1.2 Kx=RSA Au=RSA Enc=AESGCM(128) Mac=AEAD AES256-GCM-SHA384 TLSv1.2 Kx=RSA Au=RSA Enc=AESGCM(256) Mac=AEAD AES128-SHA SSLv3 Kx=RSA Au=RSA Enc=AES(128) Mac=SHA1 AES256-SHA SSLv3 Kx=RSA Au=RSA Enc=AES(256) Mac=SHA1 AES128-SHA256 TLSv1.2 Kx=RSA Au=RSA Enc=AES(128) Mac=SHA256 AES256-SHA256 TLSv1.2 Kx=RSA Au=RSA Enc=AES(256) Mac=SHA256 ECDHE-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA SSLv3 Kx=ECDH Au=RSA Enc=3DES(168) Mac=SHA1 ECDHE-ECDSA-DES-CBC3-SHA SSLv3 Kx=ECDH Au=ECDSA Enc=3DES(168) Mac=SHA1 DES-CBC3-SHA SSLv3 Kx=RSA Au=RSA Enc=3DES(168) Mac=SHA1 Now let's see what happens if you use 'DEFAULT': openssl ciphers -v 'DEFAULT' ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 TLSv1.2 Kx=ECDH Au=RSA Enc=AESGCM(256) Mac=AEAD ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 TLSv1.2 Kx=ECDH Au=ECDSA Enc=AESGCM(256) Mac=AEAD ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384 TLSv1.2 Kx=ECDH Au=RSA Enc=AES(256) Mac=SHA384 ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA384 TLSv1.2 Kx=ECDH Au=ECDSA Enc=AES(256) Mac=SHA384 ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA SSLv3 Kx=ECDH Au=RSA Enc=AES(256) Mac=SHA1 ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA SSLv3 Kx=ECDH Au=ECDSA Enc=AES(256) Mac=SHA1 DHE-DSS-AES256-GCM-SHA384 TLSv1.2 Kx=DH Au=DSS Enc=AESGCM(256) Mac=AEAD DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 TLSv1.2 Kx=DH Au=RSA Enc=AESGCM(256) Mac=AEAD DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA256 TLSv1.2 Kx=DH Au=RSA Enc=AES(256) Mac=SHA256 DHE-DSS-AES256-SHA256 TLSv1.2 Kx=DH Au=DSS Enc=AES(256) Mac=SHA256 DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA SSLv3 Kx=DH Au=RSA Enc=AES(256) Mac=SHA1 DHE-DSS-AES256-SHA SSLv3 Kx=DH Au=DSS Enc=AES(256) Mac=SHA1 DHE-RSA-CAMELLIA256-SHA SSLv3 Kx=DH Au=RSA Enc=Camellia(256) Mac=SHA1 DHE-DSS-CAMELLIA256-SHA SSLv3 Kx=DH Au=DSS Enc=Camellia(256) Mac=SHA1 ECDH-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 TLSv1.2 Kx=ECDH/RSA Au=ECDH Enc=AESGCM(256) Mac=AEAD ECDH-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 TLSv1.2 Kx=ECDH/ECDSA Au=ECDH Enc=AESGCM(256) Mac=AEAD ECDH-RSA-AES256-SHA384 TLSv1.2 Kx=ECDH/RSA Au=ECDH Enc=AES(256) Mac=SHA384 ECDH-ECDSA-AES256-SHA384 TLSv1.2 Kx=ECDH/ECDSA Au=ECDH Enc=AES(256) Mac=SHA384 ECDH-RSA-AES256-SHA SSLv3 Kx=ECDH/RSA Au=ECDH Enc=AES(256) Mac=SHA1 ECDH-ECDSA-AES256-SHA SSLv3 Kx=ECDH/ECDSA Au=ECDH Enc=AES(256) Mac=SHA1 AES256-GCM-SHA384 TLSv1.2 Kx=RSA Au=RSA Enc=AESGCM(256) Mac=AEAD AES256-SHA256 TLSv1.2 Kx=RSA Au=RSA Enc=AES(256) Mac=SHA256 AES256-SHA SSLv3 Kx=RSA Au=RSA Enc=AES(256) Mac=SHA1 CAMELLIA256-SHA SSLv3 Kx=RSA Au=RSA Enc=Camellia(256) Mac=SHA1 PSK-AES256-CBC-SHA SSLv3 Kx=PSK Au=PSK Enc=AES(256) Mac=SHA1 ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 TLSv1.2 Kx=ECDH Au=RSA Enc=AESGCM(128) Mac=AEAD ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 TLSv1.2 Kx=ECDH Au=ECDSA Enc=AESGCM(128) Mac=AEAD ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256 TLSv1.2 Kx=ECDH Au=RSA Enc=AES(128) Mac=SHA256 ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA256 TLSv1.2 Kx=ECDH Au=ECDSA Enc=AES(128) Mac=SHA256 ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA SSLv3 Kx=ECDH Au=RSA Enc=AES(128) Mac=SHA1 ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA SSLv3 Kx=ECDH Au=ECDSA Enc=AES(128) Mac=SHA1 DHE-DSS-AES128-GCM-SHA256 TLSv1.2 Kx=DH Au=DSS Enc=AESGCM(128) Mac=AEAD DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 TLSv1.2 Kx=DH Au=RSA Enc=AESGCM(128) Mac=AEAD DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256 TLSv1.2 Kx=DH Au=RSA Enc=AES(128) Mac=SHA256 DHE-DSS-AES128-SHA256 TLSv1.2 Kx=DH Au=DSS Enc=AES(128) Mac=SHA256 DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA SSLv3 Kx=DH Au=RSA Enc=AES(128) Mac=SHA1 DHE-DSS-AES128-SHA SSLv3 Kx=DH Au=DSS Enc=AES(128) Mac=SHA1 DHE-RSA-SEED-SHA SSLv3 Kx=DH Au=RSA Enc=SEED(128) Mac=SHA1 DHE-DSS-SEED-SHA SSLv3 Kx=DH Au=DSS Enc=SEED(128) Mac=SHA1 DHE-RSA-CAMELLIA128-SHA SSLv3 Kx=DH Au=RSA Enc=Camellia(128) Mac=SHA1 DHE-DSS-CAMELLIA128-SHA SSLv3 Kx=DH Au=DSS Enc=Camellia(128) Mac=SHA1 ECDH-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 TLSv1.2 Kx=ECDH/RSA Au=ECDH Enc=AESGCM(128) Mac=AEAD ECDH-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 TLSv1.2 Kx=ECDH/ECDSA Au=ECDH Enc=AESGCM(128) Mac=AEAD ECDH-RSA-AES128-SHA256 TLSv1.2 Kx=ECDH/RSA Au=ECDH Enc=AES(128) Mac=SHA256 ECDH-ECDSA-AES128-SHA256 TLSv1.2 Kx=ECDH/ECDSA Au=ECDH Enc=AES(128) Mac=SHA256 ECDH-RSA-AES128-SHA SSLv3 Kx=ECDH/RSA Au=ECDH Enc=AES(128) Mac=SHA1 ECDH-ECDSA-AES128-SHA SSLv3 Kx=ECDH/ECDSA Au=ECDH Enc=AES(128) Mac=SHA1 AES128-GCM-SHA256 TLSv1.2 Kx=RSA Au=RSA Enc=AESGCM(128) Mac=AEAD AES128-SHA256 TLSv1.2 Kx=RSA Au=RSA Enc=AES(128) Mac=SHA256 AES128-SHA SSLv3 Kx=RSA Au=RSA Enc=AES(128) Mac=SHA1 SEED-SHA SSLv3 Kx=RSA Au=RSA Enc=SEED(128) Mac=SHA1 CAMELLIA128-SHA SSLv3 Kx=RSA Au=RSA Enc=Camellia(128) Mac=SHA1 PSK-AES128-CBC-SHA SSLv3 Kx=PSK Au=PSK Enc=AES(128) Mac=SHA1 ECDHE-RSA-RC4-SHA SSLv3 Kx=ECDH Au=RSA Enc=RC4(128) Mac=SHA1 ECDHE-ECDSA-RC4-SHA SSLv3 Kx=ECDH Au=ECDSA Enc=RC4(128) Mac=SHA1 ECDH-RSA-RC4-SHA SSLv3 Kx=ECDH/RSA Au=ECDH Enc=RC4(128) Mac=SHA1 ECDH-ECDSA-RC4-SHA SSLv3 Kx=ECDH/ECDSA Au=ECDH Enc=RC4(128) Mac=SHA1 RC4-SHA SSLv3 Kx=RSA Au=RSA Enc=RC4(128) Mac=SHA1 RC4-MD5 SSLv3 Kx=RSA Au=RSA Enc=RC4(128) Mac=MD5 PSK-RC4-SHA SSLv3 Kx=PSK Au=PSK Enc=RC4(128) Mac=SHA1 ECDHE-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA SSLv3 Kx=ECDH Au=RSA Enc=3DES(168) Mac=SHA1 ECDHE-ECDSA-DES-CBC3-SHA SSLv3 Kx=ECDH Au=ECDSA Enc=3DES(168) Mac=SHA1 EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA SSLv3 Kx=DH Au=RSA Enc=3DES(168) Mac=SHA1 EDH-DSS-DES-CBC3-SHA SSLv3 Kx=DH Au=DSS Enc=3DES(168) Mac=SHA1 ECDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA SSLv3 Kx=ECDH/RSA Au=ECDH Enc=3DES(168) Mac=SHA1 ECDH-ECDSA-DES-CBC3-SHA SSLv3 Kx=ECDH/ECDSA Au=ECDH Enc=3DES(168) Mac=SHA1 DES-CBC3-SHA SSLv3 Kx=RSA Au=RSA Enc=3DES(168) Mac=SHA1 PSK-3DES-EDE-CBC-SHA SSLv3 Kx=PSK Au=PSK Enc=3DES(168) Mac=SHA1 EDH-RSA-DES-CBC-SHA SSLv3 Kx=DH Au=RSA Enc=DES(56) Mac=SHA1 EDH-DSS-DES-CBC-SHA SSLv3 Kx=DH Au=DSS Enc=DES(56) Mac=SHA1 DES-CBC-SHA SSLv3 Kx=RSA Au=RSA Enc=DES(56) Mac=SHA1 EXP-EDH-RSA-DES-CBC-SHA SSLv3 Kx=DH(512) Au=RSA Enc=DES(40) Mac=SHA1 export EXP-EDH-DSS-DES-CBC-SHA SSLv3 Kx=DH(512) Au=DSS Enc=DES(40) Mac=SHA1 export EXP-DES-CBC-SHA SSLv3 Kx=RSA(512) Au=RSA Enc=DES(40) Mac=SHA1 export EXP-RC2-CBC-MD5 SSLv3 Kx=RSA(512) Au=RSA Enc=RC2(40) Mac=MD5 export EXP-RC4-MD5 SSLv3 Kx=RSA(512) Au=RSA Enc=RC4(40) Mac=MD5 export As you can see that enables far, far more ciphers, including a number of unsafe ciphers – export, MD5, DES, etc. This is a good example of why you always want to confirm your cipher settings and check exactly what is being enabled before placing new settings into production. Many security disasters could be avoided if everyone doublechecked their settings first. Let’s take a closer look at how OpenSSL represents one of the cipher suites: ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 TLSv1.2 Kx=ECDH Au=RSA Enc=AESGCM(256) Mac=AEAD The columns are: Cipher Suite: ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 Protocol: TLSv1.2 Key Exchange Algorithm (Kx): ECDH Authentication Algorithm (Au): RSA Cipher/Encryption Algorithm (Enc): AESGCM(256) MAC (Mac): AEAD Since the control plane uses OpenSSL you can use the standard OpenSSL documentation, so I won't spend a lot of time on that. Data Plane In TMM the cipher suites are configured in the Ciphers field of the Client SSL or Server SSL profiles. See K14783: Overview of the Client SSL profile (11.x - 12.x) & K14806: Overview of the Server SSL profile (11.x - 12.x), respectively for more details. It is important to keep in mind that these are two different worlds with their own requirements and quirks. As most of the configuration activity, and security concerns, occur on the public facing side of the system, we'll focus on the Client SSL Profile. Most of the things we'll cover here will also apply to the Server SSL profile. In the GUI it appears as an editable field: Presuming the profile was created with the name 'Test': tmsh list ltm profile client-ssl Test ltm profile client-ssl Test { app-service none cert default.crt cert-key-chain { default { cert default.crt key default.key } } chain none ciphers DEFAULT defaults-from clientssl inherit-certkeychain true key default.key passphrase none } Modifying the cipher configuration from the command line is simple. tmsh list ltm profile client-ssl Test ciphers ltm profile client-ssl Test { ciphers DEFAULT } tmsh modify ltm profile client-ssl Test ciphers 'DEFAULT:!3DES' tmsh list ltm profile client-ssl Test ciphers ltm profile client-ssl Test { ciphers DEFAULT:!3DES } Just remember the ' tmsh save sys config ' when you're happy with the configuration. Note here the default is just 'DEFAULT'. What that expands to will vary depending on the version of TMOS. K13156: SSL ciphers used in the default SSL profiles (11.x - 12.x) defines the default values for each version of TMOS. Or you can check it locally from the command line: tmm --clientciphers 'DEFAULT' On 12.1.2 that would be: tmm --clientciphers 'DEFAULT' ID SUITE BITS PROT METHOD CIPHER MAC KEYX 0: 159 DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 256 TLS1.2 Native AES-GCM SHA384 EDH/RSA 1: 158 DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 128 TLS1.2 Native AES-GCM SHA256 EDH/RSA 2: 107 DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA256 256 TLS1.2 Native AES SHA256 EDH/RSA 3: 57 DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA 256 TLS1 Native AES SHA EDH/RSA 4: 57 DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA 256 TLS1.1 Native AES SHA EDH/RSA 5: 57 DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA 256 TLS1.2 Native AES SHA EDH/RSA 6: 57 DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA 256 DTLS1 Native AES SHA EDH/RSA 7: 103 DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256 128 TLS1.2 Native AES SHA256 EDH/RSA 8: 51 DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA 128 TLS1 Native AES SHA EDH/RSA 9: 51 DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA 128 TLS1.1 Native AES SHA EDH/RSA 10: 51 DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA 128 TLS1.2 Native AES SHA EDH/RSA 11: 51 DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA 128 DTLS1 Native AES SHA EDH/RSA 12: 22 DHE-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA 168 TLS1 Native DES SHA EDH/RSA 13: 22 DHE-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA 168 TLS1.1 Native DES SHA EDH/RSA 14: 22 DHE-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA 168 TLS1.2 Native DES SHA EDH/RSA 15: 22 DHE-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA 168 DTLS1 Native DES SHA EDH/RSA 16: 157 AES256-GCM-SHA384 256 TLS1.2 Native AES-GCM SHA384 RSA 17: 156 AES128-GCM-SHA256 128 TLS1.2 Native AES-GCM SHA256 RSA 18: 61 AES256-SHA256 256 TLS1.2 Native AES SHA256 RSA 19: 53 AES256-SHA 256 TLS1 Native AES SHA RSA 20: 53 AES256-SHA 256 TLS1.1 Native AES SHA RSA 21: 53 AES256-SHA 256 TLS1.2 Native AES SHA RSA 22: 53 AES256-SHA 256 DTLS1 Native AES SHA RSA 23: 60 AES128-SHA256 128 TLS1.2 Native AES SHA256 RSA 24: 47 AES128-SHA 128 TLS1 Native AES SHA RSA 25: 47 AES128-SHA 128 TLS1.1 Native AES SHA RSA 26: 47 AES128-SHA 128 TLS1.2 Native AES SHA RSA 27: 47 AES128-SHA 128 DTLS1 Native AES SHA RSA 28: 10 DES-CBC3-SHA 168 TLS1 Native DES SHA RSA 29: 10 DES-CBC3-SHA 168 TLS1.1 Native DES SHA RSA 30: 10 DES-CBC3-SHA 168 TLS1.2 Native DES SHA RSA 31: 10 DES-CBC3-SHA 168 DTLS1 Native DES SHA RSA 32: 49200 ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 256 TLS1.2 Native AES-GCM SHA384 ECDHE_RSA 33: 49199 ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 128 TLS1.2 Native AES-GCM SHA256 ECDHE_RSA 34: 49192 ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384 256 TLS1.2 Native AES SHA384 ECDHE_RSA 35: 49172 ECDHE-RSA-AES256-CBC-SHA 256 TLS1 Native AES SHA ECDHE_RSA 36: 49172 ECDHE-RSA-AES256-CBC-SHA 256 TLS1.1 Native AES SHA ECDHE_RSA 37: 49172 ECDHE-RSA-AES256-CBC-SHA 256 TLS1.2 Native AES SHA ECDHE_RSA 38: 49191 ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256 128 TLS1.2 Native AES SHA256 ECDHE_RSA 39: 49171 ECDHE-RSA-AES128-CBC-SHA 128 TLS1 Native AES SHA ECDHE_RSA 40: 49171 ECDHE-RSA-AES128-CBC-SHA 128 TLS1.1 Native AES SHA ECDHE_RSA 41: 49171 ECDHE-RSA-AES128-CBC-SHA 128 TLS1.2 Native AES SHA ECDHE_RSA 42: 49170 ECDHE-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA 168 TLS1 Native DES SHA ECDHE_RSA 43: 49170 ECDHE-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA 168 TLS1.1 Native DES SHA ECDHE_RSA 44: 49170 ECDHE-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA 168 TLS1.2 Native DES SHA ECDHE_RSA Some differences when compared to OpenSSL are readily apparent. For starters, TMM kindly includes a column label header, and actually aligns the columns. The first column is simply a 0-ordinal numeric index, the rest are as follows: ID: The official SSL/TLS ID assigned to that cipher suite. SUITE: The cipher suite. BITS: The size of the key in bits. PROT: The protocol supported. METHOD: NATIVE (in TMM) vs. COMPAT (using OpenSSL code). CIPHER: The cipher. MAC: The hash function. KEYX: The Key Exchange and Authentication Algorithms Note that the MAC is a little misleading for AES-GCM cipher suites. There is no separate MAC as they're AEAD. But the hashing algorithm is used in the Pseudo-Random Function (PRF) and a few other handshake related places. Selecting the Cipher Suites Now we know how to look at the current configuration, modify it, and list the actual ciphers that will be enabled by the listed suites. But what do we put into the configuration? Most users won't have to touch this. The default values are carefully selected by F5 to meet the needs of the majority of our customers. That's the good news. The bad news is that some customers will need to get in there and change the configuration – be it for regulatory compliance, internal policies, legacy client support, etc. Once you begin modifying them, the configuration is truly custom for each customer. Every customer who modifies the configuration, and uses a custom cipher configuration, needs to determine what the proper list is for their needs. Let's say we have determined that we need to support only AES & AES-GCM, 128-bit or 256-bit, and only ECDHE key exchange. Any MAC or Authentication is fine. OK, let's proceed from there. On 12.1.2 there are six cipher suites that fit those criteria. We could list them all explicitly: tmm --clientciphers 'ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-CBC-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-CBC-SHA' That will work, but it gets unwieldy fast. Not only that, but in versions up to 11.5.0 the ciphers configuration string was truncated at 256bytes. Starting in 11.5.0 that was increased to 768bytes, but that can still truncate long configurations. We'll revisit this when we get to the pitfalls section. Fortunately, there is an alternative – keywords! This will result in the same list of cipher suites: tmm --clientciphers 'ECDHE+AES-GCM:ECDHE+AES' That specifies the ECDHE key exchange with AES-GCM ciphers, and ECDHE with AES ciphers. Let's take a closer look to help understand what is happening here. Keywords Keywords are extremely important when working with cipher suite configuration, so we'll spend a little time on those. Most of these apply to both the control plane (OpenSSL) and the data plane (TMM), unless otherwise noted, but we're focused on the data plane as that's F5 specific. Keywords organize into different categories. F5 specific: NATIVE: cipher suites implemented natively in TMM COMPAT: cipher suites using OpenSSL code; removed as of 12.0.0 @SPEED: Re-orders the list to put 'faster' (based on TMOS implementation performance) ciphers first. Sorting: @SPEED: Re-orders the list to put 'faster' (based on TMOS implementation performance) ciphers first. (F5 Specific) @STRENGTH: Re-orders the list to put 'stronger' (larger keys) ciphers first. Protocol: TLSv1_2: cipher suites available under TLSv1.2 TLSv1_1: cipher suites available under TLSv1.1 TLSv1: cipher suites available under TLSv1.0 SSLv3: cipher suites available under SSLv3 Note the 'Protocol' keywords in the cipher configuration control the ciphers associated with that protocol, and not the protocol itself! More on this in pitfalls. Key Exchange Algorithms (sometimes with Authentication specified): ECDHE or ECDHA_RSA: Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman Ephemeral (with RSA) ECDHE_ECDSA: ECDHE with Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm DHE or EDH: Diffie-Hellman Ephemeral (aka Ephemeral Diffie-Hellman) (with RSA) DHE_DSS: DHE with Digital Signature Standard (aka DSA – Digital Signature Algorithm) ECDH_RSA: Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman with RSA ECDH_ECDSA: ECDH with ECDSA RSA: RSA, obviously ADH: Anonymous Diffie-Hellman. Note the Authentication Algorithms don't work as standalone keywords in TMM. You can't use 'ECDSA' or 'DSS' for example. And you might think ECDHE or DHE includes all such cipher suites – note that they don't if you read carefully. General cipher groupings: DEFAULT: The default cipher suite for that version; see K13156 ALL: All NATIVE cipher suites; does not include COMPAT in current versions HIGH: 'High' security cipher suites; >128-bit MEDIUM: 'Medium' security cipher suites; effectively 128-bit suites LOW: 'Low' security cipher suites; <128-bit excluding export grade ciphers EXP or EXPORT: Export grade ciphers; 40-bit or 56-bit EXPORT56: 56-bit export ciphers EXPORT40: 40-bit export ciphers Note that DEFAULT does change periodically as F5 updates the configuration to follow the latest best practices. K13156: SSL ciphers used in the default SSL profiles (11.x - 12.x) documents these changes. Cipher families: AES-GCM: AES in GCM mode; 128-bit or 256-bit AES: AES in CBC mode; 128-bit or 256-bit CAMELLIA: Camellia in CBC mode; 128-bit or 256-bit 3DES: Triple DES in CBC mode; 168-bit (well, 112-bit really) DES: Single DES in CBC mode, includes EXPORTciphers;40-bit & 56-bit. RC4: RC4 stream cipher NULL: NULL cipher; just what it sounds like, it does nothing – no encryption MAC aka Hash Function: SHA384: SHA-2 384-bit hash SHA256: SHA-2 256-bit hash SHA1 or SHA: SHA-1 160-bit hash MD5: MD5 128-bit hash Other: On older TMOS versions when using the COMPAT keyword it also enables two additional keywords: SSLv2: Ciphers supported on the SSLv2 protocol RC2: RC2 ciphers. So, let's go back to our example: tmm --clientciphers 'ECDHE+AES-GCM:ECDHE+AES' Note that you can combine keywords using '+' (plus sign). And multiple entries in the ciphers configuration line are separated with ':' (colon). You may also need to wrap the string in single quotes on the command line – I find it is a good habit to just always do so. We can also exclude suites or keywords. There are two ways to do that: '!' (exclamation point) is a hard exclusion. Anything excluded this way cannot be implicitly or explicitly re-enabled. It is disabled, period. '-' (minus sign or dash) is a soft exclusion. Anything excluded this way can be explicitly re-enabled later in the configuration string. (Note: The dash is also usedinthe names of many cipher suites, such as ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 or AES128-SHA. Do not confuse the dashes that are part of the cipher suite names with a soft exclusion, which alwaysprecedes, or prefixes,the value being excluded. 'AES128-SHA': AES128-SHA cipher suite. '-SHA': SHA is soft excluded. '-AES128-SHA': the AES128-SHA cipher suite is soft excluded. Position matters.) Let's look at the difference in hard and soft exclusions. We'll start with our base example: tmm --clientciphers 'ECDHE+AES-GCM:DHE+AES-GCM' ID SUITE BITS PROT METHOD CIPHER MAC KEYX 0: 49200 ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 256 TLS1.2 Native AES-GCM SHA384 ECDHE_RSA 1: 49199 ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 128 TLS1.2 Native AES-GCM SHA256 ECDHE_RSA 2: 159 DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 256 TLS1.2 Native AES-GCM SHA384 EDH/RSA 3: 158 DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 128 TLS1.2 Native AES-GCM SHA256 EDH/RSA Now let's look at a hard exclusion: tmm --clientciphers 'ECDHE+AES-GCM:!DHE:DHE+AES-GCM' ID SUITE BITS PROT METHOD CIPHER MAC KEYX 0: 49200 ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 256 TLS1.2 Native AES-GCM SHA384 ECDHE_RSA 1: 49199 ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 128 TLS1.2 Native AES-GCM SHA256 ECDHE_RSA And lastly a soft exclusion: tmm --clientciphers 'ECDHE+AES-GCM:-DHE:DHE+AES-GCM' ID SUITE BITS PROT METHOD CIPHER MAC KEYX 0: 49200 ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 256 TLS1.2 Native AES-GCM SHA384 ECDHE_RSA 1: 49199 ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 128 TLS1.2 Native AES-GCM SHA256 ECDHE_RSA 2: 159 DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 256 TLS1.2 Native AES-GCM SHA384 EDH/RSA 3: 158 DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 128 TLS1.2 Native AES-GCM SHA256 EDH/RSA Note that in the second example, the hard exclusion, we used '!DHE' and even though we then explicitly added 'DHE+AES-GCM' those ciphers were not enabled. This is because, once excluded with a hard exclusion, ciphers cannot be re-enabled. In the third example, the soft exclusion, we used '-DHE' and then 'DHE+AES-GCM'. This time it did enable those ciphers, which is possible with a soft exclusion. You might be wondering what soft disabling is useful for; why would you ever want to remove ciphers only to add them again? Reordering the ciphers is a common use case. As an example, DEFAULT orders ciphers differently in different versions, but mainly based on strength – bit size. Let's say we know 3DES is really 112-bit equivalent strength and not 168-bit as it is usually labeled. For some reason, maybe legacy clients, we can't disable them, but we want them to be last on the list. One way to do this is to first configure the DEFAULT list, then remove all of the 3DES ciphers. But then add the 3DES ciphers back explicitly – at the end of the list. Let's try it – compare the following: tmm --clientciphers 'DEFAULT' ID SUITE BITS PROT METHOD CIPHER MAC KEYX 0: 159 DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 256 TLS1.2 Native AES-GCM SHA384 EDH/RSA 1: 158 DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 128 TLS1.2 Native AES-GCM SHA256 EDH/RSA 2: 107 DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA256 256 TLS1.2 Native AES SHA256 EDH/RSA 3: 57 DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA 256 TLS1 Native AES SHA EDH/RSA 4: 57 DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA 256 TLS1.1 Native AES SHA EDH/RSA 5: 57 DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA 256 TLS1.2 Native AES SHA EDH/RSA 6: 57 DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA 256 DTLS1 Native AES SHA EDH/RSA 7: 103 DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256 128 TLS1.2 Native AES SHA256 EDH/RSA 8: 51 DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA 128 TLS1 Native AES SHA EDH/RSA 9: 51 DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA 128 TLS1.1 Native AES SHA EDH/RSA 10: 51 DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA 128 TLS1.2 Native AES SHA EDH/RSA 11: 51 DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA 128 DTLS1 Native AES SHA EDH/RSA 12: 22 DHE-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA 168 TLS1 Native DES SHA EDH/RSA 13: 22 DHE-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA 168 TLS1.1 Native DES SHA EDH/RSA 14: 22 DHE-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA 168 TLS1.2 Native DES SHA EDH/RSA 15: 22 DHE-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA 168 DTLS1 Native DES SHA EDH/RSA 16: 157 AES256-GCM-SHA384 256 TLS1.2 Native AES-GCM SHA384 RSA 17: 156 AES128-GCM-SHA256 128 TLS1.2 Native AES-GCM SHA256 RSA 18: 61 AES256-SHA256 256 TLS1.2 Native AES SHA256 RSA 19: 53 AES256-SHA 256 TLS1 Native AES SHA RSA 20: 53 AES256-SHA 256 TLS1.1 Native AES SHA RSA 21: 53 AES256-SHA 256 TLS1.2 Native AES SHA RSA 22: 53 AES256-SHA 256 DTLS1 Native AES SHA RSA 23: 60 AES128-SHA256 128 TLS1.2 Native AES SHA256 RSA 24: 47 AES128-SHA 128 TLS1 Native AES SHA RSA 25: 47 AES128-SHA 128 TLS1.1 Native AES SHA RSA 26: 47 AES128-SHA 128 TLS1.2 Native AES SHA RSA 27: 47 AES128-SHA 128 DTLS1 Native AES SHA RSA 28: 10 DES-CBC3-SHA 168 TLS1 Native DES SHA RSA 29: 10 DES-CBC3-SHA 168 TLS1.1 Native DES SHA RSA 30: 10 DES-CBC3-SHA 168 TLS1.2 Native DES SHA RSA 31: 10 DES-CBC3-SHA 168 DTLS1 Native DES SHA RSA 32: 49200 ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 256 TLS1.2 Native AES-GCM SHA384 ECDHE_RSA 33: 49199 ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 128 TLS1.2 Native AES-GCM SHA256 ECDHE_RSA 34: 49192 ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384 256 TLS1.2 Native AES SHA384 ECDHE_RSA 35: 49172 ECDHE-RSA-AES256-CBC-SHA 256 TLS1 Native AES SHA ECDHE_RSA 36: 49172 ECDHE-RSA-AES256-CBC-SHA 256 TLS1.1 Native AES SHA ECDHE_RSA 37: 49172 ECDHE-RSA-AES256-CBC-SHA 256 TLS1.2 Native AES SHA ECDHE_RSA 38: 49191 ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256 128 TLS1.2 Native AES SHA256 ECDHE_RSA 39: 49171 ECDHE-RSA-AES128-CBC-SHA 128 TLS1 Native AES SHA ECDHE_RSA 40: 49171 ECDHE-RSA-AES128-CBC-SHA 128 TLS1.1 Native AES SHA ECDHE_RSA 41: 49171 ECDHE-RSA-AES128-CBC-SHA 128 TLS1.2 Native AES SHA ECDHE_RSA 42: 49170 ECDHE-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA 168 TLS1 Native DES SHA ECDHE_RSA 43: 49170 ECDHE-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA 168 TLS1.1 Native DES SHA ECDHE_RSA 44: 49170 ECDHE-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA 168 TLS1.2 Native DES SHA ECDHE_RSA tmm --clientciphers 'DEFAULT:-3DES:!SSLv3:3DES+ECDHE:3DES+DHE:3DES+RSA' ID SUITE BITS PROT METHOD CIPHER MAC KEYX 0: 159 DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 256 TLS1.2 Native AES-GCM SHA384 EDH/RSA 1: 158 DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 128 TLS1.2 Native AES-GCM SHA256 EDH/RSA 2: 107 DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA256 256 TLS1.2 Native AES SHA256 EDH/RSA 3: 57 DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA 256 TLS1 Native AES SHA EDH/RSA 4: 57 DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA 256 TLS1.1 Native AES SHA EDH/RSA 5: 57 DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA 256 TLS1.2 Native AES SHA EDH/RSA 6: 57 DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA 256 DTLS1 Native AES SHA EDH/RSA 7: 103 DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256 128 TLS1.2 Native AES SHA256 EDH/RSA 8: 51 DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA 128 TLS1 Native AES SHA EDH/RSA 9: 51 DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA 128 TLS1.1 Native AES SHA EDH/RSA 10: 51 DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA 128 TLS1.2 Native AES SHA EDH/RSA 11: 51 DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA 128 DTLS1 Native AES SHA EDH/RSA 12: 157 AES256-GCM-SHA384 256 TLS1.2 Native AES-GCM SHA384 RSA 13: 156 AES128-GCM-SHA256 128 TLS1.2 Native AES-GCM SHA256 RSA 14: 61 AES256-SHA256 256 TLS1.2 Native AES SHA256 RSA 15: 53 AES256-SHA 256 TLS1 Native AES SHA RSA 16: 53 AES256-SHA 256 TLS1.1 Native AES SHA RSA 17: 53 AES256-SHA 256 TLS1.2 Native AES SHA RSA 18: 53 AES256-SHA 256 DTLS1 Native AES SHA RSA 19: 60 AES128-SHA256 128 TLS1.2 Native AES SHA256 RSA 20: 47 AES128-SHA 128 TLS1 Native AES SHA RSA 21: 47 AES128-SHA 128 TLS1.1 Native AES SHA RSA 22: 47 AES128-SHA 128 TLS1.2 Native AES SHA RSA 23: 47 AES128-SHA 128 DTLS1 Native AES SHA RSA 24: 49200 ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 256 TLS1.2 Native AES-GCM SHA384 ECDHE_RSA 25: 49199 ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 128 TLS1.2 Native AES-GCM SHA256 ECDHE_RSA 26: 49192 ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384 256 TLS1.2 Native AES SHA384 ECDHE_RSA 27: 49172 ECDHE-RSA-AES256-CBC-SHA 256 TLS1 Native AES SHA ECDHE_RSA 28: 49172 ECDHE-RSA-AES256-CBC-SHA 256 TLS1.1 Native AES SHA ECDHE_RSA 29: 49172 ECDHE-RSA-AES256-CBC-SHA 256 TLS1.2 Native AES SHA ECDHE_RSA 30: 49191 ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256 128 TLS1.2 Native AES SHA256 ECDHE_RSA 31: 49171 ECDHE-RSA-AES128-CBC-SHA 128 TLS1 Native AES SHA ECDHE_RSA 32: 49171 ECDHE-RSA-AES128-CBC-SHA 128 TLS1.1 Native AES SHA ECDHE_RSA 33: 49171 ECDHE-RSA-AES128-CBC-SHA 128 TLS1.2 Native AES SHA ECDHE_RSA 34: 49170 ECDHE-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA 168 TLS1 Native DES SHA ECDHE_RSA 35: 49170 ECDHE-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA 168 TLS1.1 Native DES SHA ECDHE_RSA 36: 49170 ECDHE-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA 168 TLS1.2 Native DES SHA ECDHE_RSA 37: 22 DHE-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA 168 TLS1 Native DES SHA EDH/RSA 38: 22 DHE-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA 168 TLS1.1 Native DES SHA EDH/RSA 39: 22 DHE-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA 168 TLS1.2 Native DES SHA EDH/RSA 40: 22 DHE-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA 168 DTLS1 Native DES SHA EDH/RSA 41: 10 DES-CBC3-SHA 168 TLS1 Native DES SHA RSA 42: 10 DES-CBC3-SHA 168 TLS1.1 Native DES SHA RSA 43: 10 DES-CBC3-SHA 168 TLS1.2 Native DES SHA RSA 44: 10 DES-CBC3-SHA 168 DTLS1 Native DES SHA RSA I added something else in there which I'll come back to later. Pitfalls As should be clear by now cipher configuration is a powerful tool, but as the song says, every tool is a weapon if you hold it right. And weapons are dangerous. With a little careless handling it is easy to lose a toe – or a leg. Whenever you are working with cipher suite configuration the old rule of 'measure twice, cut once' applies – and then double-check the work to be certain. There are several common pitfalls which await you. Misuse Perhaps the most common pitfall is simply misuse – using cipher suite configuration for that which it is not intended. And the single most common example of this comes from using cipher configuration to manipulate protocols. Given the keywords, as described above, it seems common for users to presume that if they want to disable a protocol, such as TLSv1.0, then the way to do that is to use a cipher suite keyword, such as !TLSv1. And, indeed, this may seem to work – but it isn't doing what is desired. The protocol is not disabled, only the ciphers that are supported for that protocol are. The protocol is configured on the VIP independently of the ciphers. !TLSv1 would disable all ciphers supported under the TLSv1.0 protocol, but not the protocol itself. Note that the protocol negotiation and the cipher negotiation in the SSL/TLS handshake are independent. What happens if the VIP only supports TLSv1.0/v1.1/v1.2 and the client only supports SSLv3 & TLSv1.0? Well, they'd agree on TLSv1.0 as the common protocol. The cipher list the client sends in the Client Hello is independent of the protocol that is eventually negotiated. Say the client sends AES128-SHA and the server has that in its list, so it is selected. OK, we've agreed on a protocol and a cipher suite – only the server won't do any ciphers on TLSv1.0 because of '!TLSv1' in the ciphers configuration, and the connection will fail. That may seem like splitting hairs, but it makes a difference. If a scanner is looking for protocols that are enabled, and not the full handshake, it may still flag a system which has been configured this way. The protocol is negotiated during the SSL/TLS handshake before the cipher is selected. This also means the system is doing more work, as the handshake continues further before failing, and the log messages may be misleading. Instead of logging a protocol incompatibility the logs will reflect the failure to find a viable cipher, which can be a red herring when it comes time to debug the configuration. The right way to do this is to actually disable the protocol, which doesn't involve the cipher suite configuration at all. For the control plane this is done through the ssl-protocol directive: tmsh list sys http ssl-protocol sys httpd { ssl-protocol "all -SSLv2 -SSLv3" } For example, if we wanted to disable TLSv1.0: tmsh modify sys http ssl-protocol 'all -SSLv2 -SSLv3 -TLSv1' tmsh list sys http ssl-protocol sys httpd { ssl-protocol "all -SSLv2 -SSLv3 -TLSv1" } For the data plane this can be done via the Options List in the SSL Profile GUI, via the No SSL, No TLSv1.1, etc. directives: Or via the command line: tmsh list ltm profile client-ssl Test options ltm profile client-ssl Test { options { dont-insert-empty-fragments } } tmsh modify ltm profile client-ssl Test options {dont-insert-empty-fragments no-tlsv1} tmsh list /ltm profile client-ssl Test options ltm profile client-ssl Test { options { dont-insert-empty-fragments no-tlsv1 } } The values are slightly different on the command line, use this command to see them all: tmsh modify ltm profile client-ssl <profile-name> options ? Use the right tool for the job and you'll be more likely to succeed. Truncation As I previously mentioned, in versions up to 11.5.0 the ciphers configuration string was truncated at 256 bytes. Starting in 11.5.0 that was increased to 768 bytes (see K11481: The SSL profile cipher lists have a 256 character limitation for more information), but that can still silently truncate long configurations. This is not a theoretical issue, we've seen users run into this in the real world. For example, little over a year ago I worked with a customer who was then using 11.4.1 HF8. They were trying to very precisely control which ciphers were enabled, and their order. In order to do this they'd decided to enumerate every individual cipher in their configuration – resulting in this cipher suite configuration string: TLSv1_2+ECDHE-RSA-AES256-CBC-SHA:TLSv1_1+ECDHE-RSA-AES256-CBC-SHA:TLSv1_2+ECDHE-RSA-AES128-CBC-SHA:TLSv1_1+ECDHE-RSA-AES128-CBC-SHA:TLSv1_2+DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:TLSv1_1+DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:TLSv1_2+DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:TLSv1_1+DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:TLSv1_2+AES256-SHA256:TLSv1_1+AES256-SHA:TLSv1_2+AES128-SHA256:TLSv1_1+AES128-SHA:TLSv1+ECDHE-RSA-AES256-CBC-SHA:TLSv1+ECDHE-RSA-AES128-CBC-SHA:TLSv1+DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:TLSv1+DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:TLSv1+AES256-SHA:TLSv1+AES128-SHA:TLSv1+DES-CBC3-SHA That string would save in the configuration and it was there if you looked at the bigip.conf file, but it was silently truncated when the configuration was loaded. Since this was 11.4.1, only the first 256 bytes were loaded successfully, which made the running configuration: TLSv1_2+ECDHE-RSA-AES256-CBC-SHA:TLSv1_1+ECDHE-RSA-AES256-CBC-SHA:TLSv1_2+ECDHE-RSA-AES128-CBC-SHA:TLSv1_1+ECDHE-RSA-AES128-CBC-SHA:TLSv1_2+DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:TLSv1_1+DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:TLSv1_2+DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:TLSv1_1+DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:TLSv1_2+AES256-S Note the last suite is truncated itself, which means it was invalid and therefore ignored. If their configuration had worked they would've had nineteen protocol+suite combinations – instead they had eight. Needless to say, this caused some problems. This customer was missing ciphers that they expected to have working. That is bad enough – but it could be worse. Let's imagine a customer who wants to specify several specific ciphers first, then generally enable a number of other TLSv1.2 & TLSv1.1 ciphers. And, of course, they are careful to disable dangerous ciphers! TLSv1_2+ECDHE-RSA-AES256-CBC-SHA:TLSv1_1+ECDHE-RSA-AES256-CBC-SHA:TLSv1_2+ECDHE-RSA-AES128-CBC-SHA:TLSv1_1+ECDHE-RSA-AES128-CBC-SHA:TLSv1_2+DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:TLSv1_1+DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:TLSv1_2+DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:TLSv1_1+DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:TLSv1_2:TLSv1_1:!RC4:!MD5:!ADH:!DES:!EXPORT OK, that looks fairly solid, right? What do you suppose the problem with this is? This is the problem; in 11.4.1 and earlier it would truncate to this: TLSv1_2+ECDHE-RSA-AES256-CBC-SHA:TLSv1_1+ECDHE-RSA-AES256-CBC-SHA:TLSv1_2+ECDHE-RSA-AES128-CBC-SHA:TLSv1_1+ECDHE-RSA-AES128-CBC-SHA:TLSv1_2+DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:TLSv1_1+DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:TLSv1_2+DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:TLSv1_1+DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:TLSv1_2:TLSv1_1: All of the exclusions were truncated off! Now we have the opposite problem – there are a number of ciphers enabled which the customer expects to be disabled! And they're BAD ciphers – ADH, DES, MD5, RC4. So this customer would be at high risk without realizing it. Be aware of this; it is very sneaky. The configuration will look fine; the truncation happens in the code when it loads the configuration. This is also one reason why I always recommend listing your exclusions first in the configuration string. Then you can never accidentally enable something. Unintended Consequences Let's say a new CVE is announced which exposes a very serious vulnerability in SSLv3 & TLSv1.0. There is no way to mitigate it, and the only solution is to limit connections to only TLSv1.1 & TLSv1.2. You want a cipher configuration to accomplish this. It seems straight-forward – just configure it to use only ciphers on TLSv1.1 & TLSv1.2: tmsh modify ltm profile client-ssl <profile> ciphers 'TLSv1_2:TLSv1_1' Congratulations, you've solved the problem. You are no longer vulnerable to this CVE. You know there is a but coming, right? What's wrong? Well, you just enabled all TLSv1.2 & TLSv1.1 ciphers. That includes such gems as RC4-MD5, RC4-SHA, DES, and a few ADH (Anonymous Diffie-Hellman) suites which have no authentication. As recently as 11.3.0 you'd even be enabling some 40-bit EXPORT ciphers. (We pulled them out of NATIVE in 11.4.0.) So you just leapt out of the frying pan and into the fire. Always, always, always check the configuration before using it. Running that through tmm --clientciphers 'TLSv1_2:TLSv1_1' would've raised red flags. Instead, this configuration would work without causing those problems: tmsh modify ltm profile client-ssl <profile> ciphers 'DEFAULT:!TLSv1:!SSLv3' Another option, and probably the better one, is to disable the SSLv3 and TLSv1.0 protocols on the VIP. As I discussed above. Of course, you can do both – belt and suspenders. And just to show you how easy it is to make such a mistake, F5 did this! In K13400: SSL 3.0/TLS 1.0 BEAST vulnerability CVE-2011-3389 and TLS protocol vulnerability CVE-2012-1870 we originally had the following in the mitigation section: Note: Alternatively, to configure an SSL profile to use only TLS 1.1-compatible, TLS 1.2-compatible, AES-GCM, or RC4-SHA ciphers using the tmsh utility, use the following syntax: tmsh create /ltm profile client-ssl <name> ciphers TLSv1_1:TLSv1_2:AES-GCM:RC4-SHA Yes, I had this fixed long ago. Remember back in the section on keywords I had this comparison example: tmm --clientciphers 'DEFAULT' tmm --clientciphers 'DEFAULT:-3DES:!SSLv3:3DES+ECDHE:3DES+DHE:3DES+RSA' Who caught the '!SSLv3' in the second line? Why do you think I added that? Did I need to? Hint: What do you think the side effect of blanket enabling all of those 3DES ciphers would be if I didn't explicitly disable SSLv3? Cipher Ordering In SSL/TLS there are two main models to the cipher suite negotiation – Server Cipher Preference or Client Cipher Preference. What does this mean? In SSL/TLS the client sends the list of cipher suites it is willing and able to support in the Client Hello. The server also has its list of cipher suites that it is willing and able to support. In Client Cipher Preference the server will select the first cipher on the client's list that is also in the server's list. Effectively this gives the client influence over which cipher is selected based on the order of the list it sends. In Server Cipher Preference the server will select the first server on its own list that is also on the client's list. So the server gives the order of its list precedence. BIG-IP always operates in Server Cipher Preference, so be very careful in how you order your cipher suites. Preferred suites should go at the top of the list. How you order your cipher suites will directly affect which ciphers are used. It doesn't matter if a stronger cipher is available if a weak cipher is matched first. HTTP/2 How is HTTP/2 a pitfall? The HTTP/2 RFC7540 includes a blacklist of ciphers that are valid in TLS, but should not be used in HTTP/2. This can cause a problem on a server where the TLS negotiation is decoupled from the ALPN exchange for the higher level protocol. The server might select a cipher which is on the blacklist, and then when the connection attempts to step up to HTTP/2 via ALPN the client may terminate the connection with extreme prejudice. It is well known enough to be called out in the RFC – Section 9.2.2. F5 added support for HTTP/2 in 12.0.0 – and we fell into this trap. Our DEFAULT ciphers list was ordered such that it was almost certain a blacklisted cipher would be selected.; This was fixed in 12.0.0 HF3 and 12.1.0, but serves as an example. On 12.0.0 FINAL through 12.0.0 HF2 a simple fix was to configure the ciphers to be 'ECDHE+AES-GCM:DEFAULT'. ECDHE+AES-GCM is guaranteed to be supported by any client compliant with RFC7540 (HTTP/2). Putting it first ensures it is selected before any blacklisted cipher. 3DES Back in the section on ciphers I mentioned that we label 3DES as being 168-bit, but that it only provides the equivalent of 112-bit strength. So, what did I mean by that? DES operates on 64-bit data blocks, using 56-bits of key. So it has a strength of 2 56 . 3DES, aka Triple DES, was a stop-gap designed to stretch the life of DES once 56-bits was too weak to be safe, until AES became available. 3DES use the exact same DES cipher, it just uses it three times – hence the name. So you might think 3x56-bits = 168-bits. 2 168 strong. Right? No, not really. The standard implementation of 3DES is known as EDE – for Encrypt, Decrypt, Encrypt. (For reasons we don't need to get into here.) You take the 64-bit data block, run it through DES once to encrypt it with K 1 , then run it through again to decrypt it using K 2 , then encrypt it once again using K 3 . Three keys, that's still 168-bits, right? Well, you'd think so. But the devil is in the (implementation) details. First of all there are three keying options for 3DES: - Keying option 1: K1, K2, K3 – 168 unique bits (but only 112-bit strength!) - Keying option 2: K1, K2, K1 – 112 unique bits (but only 80-bit strength!) - Keying option 3: K1, K1, K1 – 56 unique bits, 56-bit strength (Equivalent to DES due to EDE!) F5 uses keying option one, so we have 168-bits of unique key. However, 3DES with keying option one is subject to a meet-in-the-middle cryptographic attack which only has a cost of 2 112 . It has even been reduced as low as 2 108 , as described in this paper. So it does not provide the expected 168-bits of security, and is in fact weaker than AES128. To add some confusion, due to an old issue we used to describe 3DES as being 192-bit. See: K17296: The BIG-IP system incorrectly reports a 192-bit key length for cipher suites using 3DES (DES-CBC3) for more details. Of course, with the appearance of the Sweet32 attack last fall I would encourage everyone to disable 3DES completely whenever possible. We're also seeing a growing number of scanners and audit tools recategorizing 3DES as a 'Medium' strength cipher, down from 'High', and correspondingly lowering the grade for any site still supporting it. If you don't need it, turn it off. See K13167034: OpenSSL vulnerability CVE-2016-2183 for more information. Conclusion Believe it or not, that's the quick overview of cipher suite configuration on BIG-IP. There are many areas where we could dig in further and spend some time in the weeds, but I hope that this article helps at least one person understand cipher suite configuration better, and to avoid the pitfalls that commonly claim those who work with them. Additional Resources This article is by no means comprehensive, and for those interested I'd encourage additional reading: BIG-IP SSL Cipher History by David Holmes, here on DevCentral Cipher Rules And Groups in BIG-IP v13 by Chase Abbott, also on DevCentral OpenSSL Cipher Documentation K8802: Using SSL ciphers with BIG-IP Client SSL and Server SSL profiles K15194: Overview of the BIG-IP SSL/TLS cipher suite K13163: SSL ciphers supported on BIG-IP platforms (11.x - 12.x) K13156: SSL ciphers used in the default SSL profiles (11.x - 12.x) K17370: Configuring the cipher strength for SSL profiles (12.x) K13171: Configuring the cipher strength for SSL profiles (11.x) K14783: Overview of the Client SSL profile (11.x - 12.x) K14806: Overview of the Server SSL profile (11.x - 12.x)Investigating the LTM TCP Profile: Congestion Control Algorithms
Introduction The LTM TCP profile has over thirty settings that can be manipulated to enhance the experience between client and server. Because the TCP profile is applied to the virtual server, the flexibility exists to customize the stack (in both client & server directions) for every application delivered by the LTM. In this series, we will dive into several of the configurable options and discuss the pros and cons of their inclusion in delivering applications. Nagle's Algorithm Max Syn Retransmissions & Idle Timeout Windows & Buffers Timers QoS Slow Start Congestion Control Algorithms Acknowledgements Extended Congestion Notification & Limited Transmit Recovery The Finish Line Quick aside for those unfamiliar with TCP: the transmission controlprotocol (layer4) rides on top of the internetprotocol (layer3) and is responsible for establishing connections between clients and servers so data can be exchanged reliably between them. Normal TCP communication consists of a client and a server, a 3-way handshake, reliable data exchange, and a four-way close. With the LTM as an intermediary in the client/server architecture, the session setup/teardown is duplicated, with the LTM playing the role of server to the client and client to the server. These sessions are completely independent, even though the LTM can duplicate the tcp source port over to the server side connection in most cases, and depending on your underlying network architecture, can also duplicate the source IP. Definitions cwnd -- congestion window; sender-side limitation on the amount of data that can be sent rwnd -- receive window; receiver-side limitation on the amount of data that can be received ssthresh -- slow start threshold; value at which tcp toggles between slow start and congestion avoidance Flightsize -- sent amount of unacknowledged data SMSS -- sender max segment size; largest segment the sender can transmit, based on MTU - overhead, path MTU discovery, or RMSS. RMSS -- receiver max segment size; largest segment the receiver is willing to accept. Congestion Control In modern TCP implementations (Reno forward), themain congestion control mechanism consists of four algorithms: slow start, congestion avoidance, fast retransmit, and fast recover. RFC 1122 required the first two (respectively), and the latter were introduced with BSD version 4.3, code name Reno. The tcp implementation (detailed in RFC 2851) in Reno has adopted that code name. New Reno introduces aslight modification to the fast recover algorithm in Reno in the absence of selective acknowledgements and is detailed in RFC 2852. Note that if selectiveacknowledgements are enabled in the profile, there will be no functional difference between Reno and New Reno. That said, the differences betweenReno and New Reno(as defined in RFC 2852) are highlighted in the following table.The bold/italic print in the New Reno column below indicates the departure from the Reno standard. Note that the New Reno fast recoveralgorithm implemented on the LTM is the careful variant of New Reno and is defined in RFC 3782. It's a little more complex and therefore isn't show above for clarity in distinguishing the differences between Reno and New Reno. The careful variant attempts to avoid unnecessary multiple fast retransmits that can occur after atimeout. All LTM version 9.x releases prior to 9.4 implement the careful variant of New Reno. Beginning in version 9.4,you can optionallyselect Reno, New Reno, High Speed, or Scalable.Highspeed is based on Reno, and Scalable is a variant of High Speed. Congestion Window Duringcongestionavoidance, the congestion windowis set differently among the available options: Reno/New Reno ACK ==> cwnd = cwnd + (1/cwnd) LOSS ==> cwnd = cwnd - (cwnd/2) High Speed ACK ==> cwnd = cwnd + (a(cwnd)/cwnd) LOSS ==> cwnd = cwnd - (cwnd * b(cwnd)) Scalable ACK ==> cwnd = cwnd + .01 LOSS ==> cwnd = cwnd * 0.875 With Reno (or stock, standard, normal, etc) TCP, cwnd increases by one packet every round trip. When congestion is detected, cwnd is halved. For long fat networks, the optimalcwnd size could be 10000 packets. This means recovery will take at least 5000 round trips, and on a 100 ms link, that means a recovery time of 500 seconds (yeah, you read that right!). The goals of High Speed and Scalable are similar (Sustain high speeds without requiring unrealistically low loss rates, reach high speed quickly in slow start, recover from congestion without huge delays, fair treatment of standard TCP) but the approaches are different.The High Speed implementation alters cwnd up or down as a function of the size of the window. Ifcwnd is small, High Speed is switched off and behaves like Reno. Cwnd grows larger and shrinks smaller than with Reno. This results in better utilization (overall and early in a connection) on long fat networks. The Scalable implementation has a multiplicative increase, unlike Reno/New Reno and High Speed. It's loss recovery mechanism is independent of the congestion window and is therefore much quicker than normal (some studies show recovery as quick as 2.7 seconds even on gigabit links). The performance improvements with High Speed and Scalable can be huge for bulk transfers, perhaps doubled or greater. Throughput results (condensed from http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/monitoring/bulk/fast/) based on a transmit queue length of 100 and an MTU of 1500 are shown in the table below. Throughput Results (condensed) TCP Implementation Mbps (after 80s) Mbps (after 1000s) Reno 56 128 Scalable 387 551 High Speed 881 913 Conclusion Since the arrival of LTM version 9.4, you have been armed with the option to increase the performance of your TCP stack significantly, while maintaining compatibility with the standard implementations. Testing is always encouraged, as every scenario welcomes additional challenges that must be solved.
Is TCP's Nagle Algorithm Right for Me?
Of all the settings in the TCP profile, the Nagle algorithm may get the most questions. Designed to avoid sending small packets wherever possible, the question of whether it's right for your application rarely has an easy, standard answer. What does Nagle do? Without the Nagle algorithm, in some circumstances TCP might send tiny packets. In the case of BIG-IP®, this would usually happen because the server delivers packets that are small relative to the clientside Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU). If Nagle is disabled, BIG-IP will simply send them, even though waiting for a few milliseconds would allow TCP to aggregate data into larger packets. The result can be pernicious. Every TCP/IP packet has at least 40 bytes of header overhead, and in most cases 52 bytes. If payloads are small enough, most of the your network traffic will be overhead and reduce the effective throughput of your connection. Second, clients with battery limitations really don't appreciate turning on their radios to send and receive packets more frequently than necessary. Lastly, some routers in the field give preferential treatment to smaller packets. If your data has a series of differently-sized packets, and the misfortune to encounter one of these routers, it will experience severe packet reordering, which can trigger unnecessary retransmissions and severely degrade performance. Specified in RFC 896 all the way back in 1984, the Nagle algorithm gets around this problem by holding sub-MTU-sized data until the receiver has acked all outstanding data. In most cases, the next chunk of data is coming up right behind, and the delay is minimal. What are the Drawbacks? The benefits of aggregating data in fewer packets are pretty intuitive. But under certain circumstances, Nagle can cause problems: In a proxy like BIG-IP, rewriting arriving packets in memory into a different, larger, spot in memory taxes the CPU more than simply passing payloads through without modification. If an application is "chatty," with message traffic passing back and forth, the added delay could add up to a lot of time. For example, imagine a network has a 1500 Byte MTU and the application needs a reply from the client after each 2000 Byte message. In the figure at right, the left diagram shows the exchange without Nagle. BIG-IP sends all the data in one shot, and the reply comes in one round trip, allowing it to deliver four messages in four round trips. On the right is the same exchange with Nagle enabled. Nagle withholds the 500 byte packet until the client acks the 1500 byte packet, meaning it takes two round trips to get the reply that allows the application to proceed. Thus sending four messages takes eight round trips. This scenario is a somewhat contrived worst case, but if your application is more like this than not, then Nagle is poor choice. If the client is using delayed acks (RFC 1122), it might not send an acknowledgment until up to 500ms after receipt of the packet. That's time BIG-IP is holding your data, waiting for acknowledgment. This multiplies the effect on chatty applications described above. F5 Has Improved on Nagle The drawbacks described above sound really scary, but I don't want to talk you out of using Nagle at all. The benefits are real, particularly if your application servers deliver data in small pieces and the application isn't very chatty. More importantly, F5® has made a number of enhancements that remove a lot of the pain while keeping the gain: Nagle-aware HTTP Profiles: all TMOS HTTP profiles send a special control message to TCP when they have no more data to send. This tells TCP to send what it has without waiting for more data to fill out a packet. Autonagle:in TMOS v12.0, users can configure Nagle as "autotuned" instead of simply enabling or disabling it in their TCP profile. This mechanism starts out not executing the Nagle algorithm, but uses heuristics to test if the receiver is using delayed acknowledgments on a connection; if not, it applies Nagle for the remainder of the connection. If delayed acks are in use, TCP will not wait to send packets but will still try to concatenate small packets into MSS-size packets when all are available. [UPDATE:v13.0 substantially improves this feature.] One small packet allowed per RTT: beginning with TMOS® v12.0, when in 'auto' mode that has enabled Nagle, TCP will allow one unacknowledged undersize packet at a time, rather than zero. This speeds up sending the sub-MTU tail of any message while not allowing a continuous stream of undersized packets. This averts the nightmare scenario above completely. Given these improvements, the Nagle algorithm is suitable for a wide variety of applications and environments. It's worth looking at both your applications and the behavior of your servers to see if Nagle is right for you.Verifying Local Traffic Policy and iRule Precedence
The BIG-IP platform has had Tcl-based iRules since the initial v9 release back in 2004. When version 11.4 released, the HTTP class was deprecated in favor of local traffic policies. The policies provide access to inspect and act on ingress and egress traffic much like iRules, but as they are TMOS-native, are more performant. Of course, iRules still provide greater flexibility, but as long as the needs are met in a policy, that should be the first choice.The interesting thing here then is what if I have a policy for the things it can handle, but an iRule for the things it can't? Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? Knowledge article K16590states clearly that policies are evaluated beforeiRules, so that clears it up. Article complete! Not so fast... The point of this article isn’t so much the result that policies come first, but to show you how to engage with the platform to discover some of these things for yourself, either because you just like to tinker, or like Ronald Reagan sold so well the Russian proverb to the American people back in the glory days of the 1980s, you prefer to trust but verify. So how do go about verifying the policy runs before the iRule? The easy button is with logging, of course! And note that it’s not so much that the policy runs first, but rather the events within the policy run before the events within the iRule. You’ll see what I mean below. First, let’s stub out one each of a dummy policy and iRule. Note you have more flow points of control in an iRule than you do in a policy. In the policy, I am not interested in this case in conditions, so there are none present, only the action of logging. Two final details. One, in the policy I have to log the event as it is not evident in the log entry created like it is with iRules. Two, I am using Tcl script in the policies in addition to the iRule so I can log the precision of the millisecond as the events trigger for logging the actual time. Configuration Details Local Traffic Policy ltm policy http_event_order { last-modified 2018-07-24:12:00:12 requires { http } rules { policy_rule_logging { actions { 0 { log client-accepted write facility local0 message "tcl:Client Accepted Timestamp: [clock click -milliseconds]" priority info } 1 { log write facility local0 message "tcl:Request Timestamp: [clock click -milliseconds]" priority info } 2 { log response write facility local0 message "tcl:Response Timestamp: [clock click -milliseconds]" priority info } } } } status published strategy first-match } iRule ltm rule http_event_order { when CLIENT_ACCEPTED { log local0. "Timestamp: [clock clicks -milliseconds]" } when HTTP_REQUEST { log local0. "Timestamp: [clock clicks -milliseconds]" } when HTTP_REQUEST_RELEASE { log local0. "Timestamp: [clock clicks -milliseconds]" } when HTTP_RESPONSE { log local0. "Timestamp: [clock clicks -milliseconds]" } when HTTP_RESPONSE_RELEASE { log local0. "Timestamp: [clock clicks -milliseconds]" } } And to finish the configuration off, we'll apply both the policy and the iRule to the virtual server. ltm virtual testvip { destination 192.168.102.50:https ip-protocol tcp mask 255.255.255.255 policies { http_event_order { } } pool testpool profiles { cssl { context clientside } http { } tcp { } } rules { http_event_order } source 0.0.0.0/0 source-address-translation { type automap } translate-address enabled translate-port enabled vs-index 50 } Verification Testing Now that we have a configuration, all we have left to do is run a test! To keep everything down to a single request, I will not use a browser and keep the response to headers only so I don’t clog up the log file. Curl to the rescue! Test Log Entries Jul 25 19:30:45 ltm3 info tmm1[13047]: [/Common/http_event_order/policy_rule_logging]: Client Accepted Timestamp: 1532565045277 Jul 25 19:30:45 ltm3 info tmm1[13047]: Rule /Common/http_event_order <CLIENT_ACCEPTED>: Timestamp: 1532565045278 Jul 25 19:30:45 ltm3 info tmm1[13047]: [/Common/http_event_order/policy_rule_logging]: Request Timestamp: 1532565045279 Jul 25 19:30:45 ltm3 info tmm1[13047]: Rule /Common/http_event_order <HTTP_REQUEST>: Timestamp: 1532565045279 Jul 25 19:30:45 ltm3 info tmm1[13047]: Rule /Common/http_event_order <HTTP_REQUEST_RELEASE>: Timestamp: 1532565045282 Jul 25 19:30:45 ltm3 info tmm1[13047]: [/Common/http_event_order/policy_rule_logging]: Response Timestamp: 1532565045285 Jul 25 19:30:45 ltm3 info tmm1[13047]: Rule /Common/http_event_order <HTTP_RESPONSE>: Timestamp: 1532565045285 Jul 25 19:30:45 ltm3 info tmm1[13047]: Rule /Common/http_event_order <HTTP_RESPONSE_RELEASE>: Timestamp: 1532565045285 Verification complete! You can see that for the like events between policies and iRules, the policy event fires first every time. You can also see that you have additional points of access in iRules with the request/response releaseevents. Now that we have verified the results of policies and iRules working together, some things to consider: Where you can, try to use a policy OVER using an iRule. Where you have to use iRules, it might make sense to put all logic in the iRule, rather than splitting the logic between them to avoid operational confusion. If performance is the primary driver and you have to use iRules and Policies together, plan and document well so everyone is aware of the breakdown of responsibility between them. Know that you can pass information from the policy actions to your iRules to enhance your solution and cut down on unnecessary logic on the iRule end. The POLICY namespace in iRules has several commands at your disposal. Thanks to Nikhil Raj for asking the question!
F5 Friday: App Proxy or ADC?
(Editors note: the LineRate product has been discontinued for several years. 09/2023) --- Choosing between BIG-IP and LineRate isn't as difficult as it seems.... Our recent announcement of the availability of LineRate Point raised the same question over and over: isn't this just a software-version of BIG-IP? How do I know when to choose LineRate Point instead of BIG-IP VE (Virtual Edition)? Aren't they the same?? No, no they aren't. LineRate Point (and really Line Rate Precision, too) is more akin to an app proxy while BIG-IP VE remains, of course, an ADC (Application Delivery Controller). That's not even pedantry, it's core to what each of the two solutions supports - both in their capabilities, their extensibility, and the applications they're designed to deliver services for. Platforms and Proxies First, let's remember that an ADC is a platform; that is, it's a software system supporting extensibility through modules. That's why we have BIG-IP . Because BIG-IP is really a platform, and its capabilities to deliver software defined application services (SDAS) are enabled through the modules it supports. Whether it's BIG-IP on F5 hardware or BIG-IP VE in the cloud or in virtual machines, it's still an extensible ADC platform. LineRate Point is a layer 7 load balancer; it's an app proxy. It's primary goal is to serve HTTP/S applications with scalability and security (like SSL and TLS). It's not extensible like BIG-IP VE. There are no "modules" you can deploy to expand its capabilities. It is what it is - a lightweight, load balancing layer 7 app proxy. Extensibility in the LineRate world is achieved with LineRate Precision, which includes node.js data path programmability (scripting) as a means to create new services, new functionality, and implement a variety of infrastructure patterns like A/B testing, Canary Deployments, Blue/Green deployments, and more. That's where the confusion with BIG-IP VE usually comes in, because in addition to its platform extensibility, BIG-IP VE also enables data path programmability through iRules. So how do you choose between the options? There's BIG-IP on F5 hardware, BIG-IP VE (virtual) and cloud (AWS, Azure, Rackspace, IBM, etc…), LineRate Point and Precision for cloud (Amazon EC2) and virtual as well as bare-metal. The best way to choose is to base it on (wait for it, wait for it) the application for which you need services delivered. C'mon, you saw that coming - it's an application world, after all, and F5 is always all about that application. Applications, Scale and Service Delivery It really is all about that application. The scale, the nature of the business function the application provides, and the services required to deliver that application are critical components in the choice of what is basically ADC or App Proxy. And you know me, a picture is worth at least 1024 words, so here it is: The first assumption we're making (and I think it's a good assumption) is that if someone deployed an application and is using it within the context of the business (or line of business or department or, well, you get the picture) then it's important enough to need some service. Maybe that's just scale or availability, maybe it needs security or a performance-boosting push, but it probably needs something. What it needs may be dependent on the number of users, the criticality of the application to productivity and profit, and the sensitivity of the data it interacts with. Given that set of criteria, you can start to see that business critical and major line of business applications - ERP, Sharepoint, Exchange, etc... - have few instances but thousands of users. These apps require high availability, massive scale, security and often performance boosts. They need multiple application services. That means BIG-IP*, and probably BIG-IP on F5 hardware or, perhaps, the deployment of a High Performance Services Fabric comprised of many BIG-IP VE using F5 Synthesis. Either way, you're talking high capacity BIG-IP. As we move down the triangular stack, we start running into line of business apps that number in the hundreds, and may have hundreds of users. These apps are of two ilk: 1. Those that require multiple application services, and 2. Those that require data path programmability Now, the app may need one or the other or both. The first question to ask (and this isn't obvious) is what protocols do the applications support? Yes, that actually is very relevant. Line Rate is basically providing app proxy services; that means app protocols like HTTP and HTTPs. Not UDP, not SIP, not RDP or PCoIP. If you need that kind of protocol support, the answer at this layer is BIG-IP VE. If the answer was HTTP or HTTPS, now you're faced with a second (easy) question: do you need multiple services? Do you need availability (load balancing and failover) plus performance boosting services like caching and acceleration options? Do you need availability plus identity management (like SSO or SAML)? If you need availability plus then the answer, again, is you should choose BIG-IP VE. If you just need availability, now you get into a more difficult decision tree. If you want (or need) data path programmability (such as might be used to patch zero-day security vulnerabilities or do some layer 7 app routing) then the question is what language do you want to script in? Do you want node.js? Choose Line Rate Precision. Want iRules? Choose BIG-IP VE. There's really no "right" or "wrong" answer here, it's a matter of preference (and probably skill set availability or standard practices in your organization). Finally, you reach the broad bottom of the triangle, where the number of apps may be in the thousands but the users per app is minimal. This is where apps need basic availability but little more. This layer is where orchestration support (robust APIs) become as important as the service itself, because continuous delivery (CD) is in play as well as other DevOps-related practices like continuous integration and testing. This environment is often very fluid, highly volatile and always in motion, requiring similar characteristics of any availability services required. In this layer of the enterprise application stack, Line Rate Point is your best choice. Coupled with our newly introduced Volume Licensing Subscription (VLS), LineRate Point here offers both the support for the environment (with its robust, proper REST API) and its software or virtual form-factor along with excellent economy of scale. Hopefully this handy-dandy guide to F5 and enterprise application segmentation helps to sort out the question whether you should choose BIG-IP, BIG-IP VE or a flavor of LineRate. Happy Friday! * Oh, I know, you could provide those services with a conga line of point products but platforms are a significant means of enabling standardization and consolidation, which greatly enhance overall value and lower both operating and capital costs.
Hands-on C: argc and argv from main() function explained
Quick Intro Learning C is is a good way to take our understanding of Operating Systems (OS) to the next level as it touches low-level structures that other languages such as Python often abstract. I'm covering C here not only because BIG-IP runs on top of Linux but also because understanding how the OS works can help us troubleshoot more complex issues. Linux has been gaining popularity and DevOps movement certainly gave it a boost as most DevOps tools run natively on Linux. As C is the nuts and bolts of Linux 'engine', it is also no surprise that we see more Platform (DevOps) Engineers interested in learning C to extend their reach when it comes to diagnosing problems and to have a more in-depth understanding of Linux. In this article, I'm going to use a simple Hello World in C but those who already had exposure to C will also benefit from understanding more thoroughly the default arguments (argc and argv) in main() function by running the code themselves. If you already know something about C, you can skip to last section and test the code yourself. Hello World This is a hello world in Python: This is a typical hello world in C: The main() function is the way we tell C where the execution of our code should start. It is the way C language signals processor where it should look for the main piece of code to run once our program is loaded in memory. The printf() function formats and print string characters to standard output. C doesn't have an interpreter like Python as it's a compiled language. Because of this, in order to execute above code we need to compile it first, i.e. create the executable file that has the binary code ready to run. How to Compile our Hello World We usegcccommand with-oparameter pointing to the name of the executable file name. Thegcccommand compiles our code and create the executablehelloworld. It's a binary file ready to be executed. If we need to change our code, we need to re-compile our code and create another executable file. Understanding #include <library_name> Adding libraries in C is similar to other programming languages. Libraries add capabilities to your code where you can find ready-to-use functions that do something that you might need to use. C libraries end in*.h(shortfor header) and compiler searches for them in/usr/includepath by default on Linux. In this particular case here, we only added thestdio.hlibrary which is the standard C I/O library with file reading/writing/streaming handling capabilities. There are also others we might occasionally bump into in most programs: unistd.h : The Unix standard library. It has utilities for interacting with the kernel such as system calls. stdlib.h : The C standard library with many useful utilities for general data type conversion, memory allocation, etc. ctype.h : Character library with for char conversion sys/types.h : System types library which contains the most definitions for base types and structures of Linux systems. string.h : String library for C string manipulation. Why does main function have argc and argv? argc= number of arguments passed when we execute program (integer) argv= list of arguments we passed when we executed program (array) Simple answer is that this is useful stuff to have natively. It's extensively used in command line tools, for example. Let's say we're creating a command line tool and we need to retrieve the 2nd argument passed to our program. You can just retrieve it directly from main() function by callingargv[2]. No need to create an extra function for that. Let's use this simple program as an example: It should print whatever arguments I pass to it: Notice that by default, the first argument is always the program's name. Even if I don't pass any arguments that's still the case: We can conclude that every program will have at least one argument which is the name of the program itself.What is HTTP Part V - HTTP Profile Basic Settings
In the first four parts of this series on HTTP, we laid the foundation for understanding what’s to come. In this article, we’ll focus on the basic settings in the BIG-IP HTTP profile. Before we dive into the HTTP-specific settings, however, let’s briefly discuss the nature of a profile. In the BIG-IP, every application is serviced by one or more virtual servers. There are literally hundreds of individual settings one can make to tune the various protocols used to service applications. Tweaking every individual setting for every individual application is not only time consuming, but at risk for human error. A profile allows an administrator to configure a sub-set of (usually) protocol specific settings that can then be applied to one or more virtual servers. Profiles can also be tiered in that you can have a baseline parent profile, and then use that to create child profiles based on that parent profile to tweak individual settings as necessary. The built-in profiles can be changed but it is not recommended you do so. The recommendation is to create a child based on a built-in profile, and customize from there. The settings we’ll focus on today are shown in the screen capture below. Note that this is TMOS version 12.1 HF1. The HTTP profile has oscillated over the versions to include or disclude various feature sets, so don’t be alarmed if your view is different. There are a few proxy modes available in the HTTP profile, but we’ll focus on reverse proxy mode. Basic Auth Realm The realm is a scope of protection for resources on an origin server. Think of realms as partitions where each can have their own authentication schemes. When authentication is required, the server should respond with a status of 401 and the WWW-Authenticate header. If you set this field to testrealm, the header value returned to the client will be Basic realm=“testrealm”. On the client end, when this response is received, a browser pop-up will trigger and provide a message like Please enter your username and password for : though some browsers do not provide the realm in this message. Fallback The two fallback fields in the profile are useful for handling adverse conditions in availability of your server pool of resources. The Fallback on Error Codes field allows you to set status codes in a space-separated list that will redirect to your Fallback Host when the server responds with any of those codes. This is useful hiding back end issues for a better user experience as well as securing any underlying server information leakage. The Fallback Host by itself is utilized when there are no available nodes to send requests to. When this happens, a status of 302 (a temporary redirect)with the specified host is returned to the client. Header Insertions, Erasures, & Allowances The profile supports limited insert/remove/sanitize functionality. On requests, you can select a single header to insert and a single header to remove. There is a precedence for insertions and removals you'll want to keep in mind if you are inserting and removing the same header. Not sure why you'd do that but I tested and it appears that the HSTS and X-Forwarded-For features will be inserted first, if either are specified in the Request Header Erase they will be removed, and if also specified in the Request Header Insert, will be re-inserted on the way to the server. On responses, you can specify a space-separated list of allowed headers and headers not in that list will be removed before the response is returned to the client. If any of that doesn’t meet your needs, you can further customize the experience with local traffic policies or iRules, which we’ll dig into in part nine of this series. Chunking The request/response chunking fields help deal with compression. We’ll talk about compression in part eight of this series. These fields control how BIG-IP handles chunked content from clients and servers as indicated in the Transfer-Encoding header. The table below shows how the settings in the profile handle chunked and unchecked data for requests and responses. OneConnect Transformations We’ll address OneConnect in part seven of this series, but basically, by enabling transformations AND having a OneConnect profile, it allows the system to change non-keepalive connection requests on the client side to keep alive connections on the server side. If this feature is enabled WITHOUT a OneConnect profile, which is default, there is no action taken. Redirect Rewrites SSL offload is a very popular component for BIG-IP deployments. Traffic from client->BIG-IP is typically secured with SSL, and often, not protected from BIG-IP->server. Some servers are either not configured or just not able to handle returning secured URLs if the server is serving unsecured content. There are many ways to handle this, but this particular setting can be configured to assure that all or request-matching URLs are rewritten from http:// to https:// links. For redirects to node IP addresses, you can also configure the redirect to be rewritten to the virtual server address instead. The default for this setting is to not rewrite redirects. The actions taken for each option in the rewrites is as follows: None: Specifies that the system does not rewrite the URI in any HTTP redirect responses. All: Specifies that the system rewrites the URI in all HTTP redirect responses. Matching: Specifies that the system rewrites the URI in any HTTP redirect responses that match the request URI. Nodes: Specifies that if the URI contains a node IP address instead of a host name, the system changes it to the virtual server address. Note that it is not content that is being rewritten here. Only the Location header in the redirect is updated. Cookie Encryption This is a security feature, enabling you to take an unencrypted cookie in a server response, encrypt it with 192-bit AES cipher, and b64 encode it before sending the response to the client. Multiple cookies can be specified in a space-separated list. This can also be done in iRules against all cookies without calling out specific cookie names. X-Forwarded-For The X-Forwarded-For header is a de-facto standard for passing client IP addresses to servers when the true nature of the force (ahem, the IP path) is not visible to servers. This is common with network address translation being prevalent between clients and server. By default the Insert field is disabled, but if enabled, the client-side IP address of the packets being received by BIG-IP will be inserted into the X-Forwarded-For header and sent to the server. As X-Forwarded-For is a de-facto standard, that means that it is no standard at all, and some proxies with insert an additional header and some will just append to a header. The Accept XFF and XFF Alternate Names fields are used for system level statistics and whether they can be trusted. More details on that (specific to ASM) can be found in solution K12264. Enabling X-Forwarded-For in the HTTP profile does not sanitize existing X-Forwarded-For headers already present in the client request. If there are two present in the request, then BIG-IP if configured to insert one will add a third. You can test this easily with curl: curl -H "X-Forwarded-For: 172.16.31.2" -H "X-Forwarded-For: 172.16.31.3" http://www.test.local/ Here are my wireshark captures on my Ubuntu test server before and after enabling the XFF header insertion in the profile: If you want to pass oneX-Forwarded-For and one only to the server, an iRule is a good idea to achieve this behavior. Linear White Space There are two fields for handling linear white space: max columns (default: 80) and the separator (default: \r\n). Linear white space is any number of spaces, tabs, newlines IF followed by at least one space or tab. From RFC2616: A CRLF is allowed in the definition of TEXT only as part of a header field continuation. It is expected that the folding LWS will be replaced with a single SP before interpretation of the TEXT value. I've not had a reason to ever change these settings. you can test for the presence of linear white space in a header with the HTTP::header lws command. This stack thread has a good answer on what linear white space is. Max Requests This is pretty straightforward. The default of zero does not limit the number of HTTP requests per connection, but changing this number will limit client requests on a per-connection basis to the value specified. Via Headers Regardless of request or response, this setting controls how BIG-IP handles the Via header. Like trace route for IP packets, the Via header will be appended with each intermediary along the way, so when the message reaches its destination, the HTTP path (not the IP path) should be known (whereas all HTTP/1.1 proxies are required to participate, HTTP/1.0 proxies that may or may not append the Via header.) When updating the header, the proxy is required to identify their hostname (or a pseudonym) and the HTTP version of the previous server in the path. Each proxy appends the information in sequential order to the header. Here’s an example Via header from Mozilla’s developer portal. Via: 1.1 vegur Via: HTTP/1.1 GWA Via: 1.0 fred, 1.1 p.example.net The available selections for this setting, request or response, is to preserve, remove, or append the Via header. Server Agent Name This is the value that BIG-IP populates in the Server header for response traffic. The default of BigIP gives away infrastructure clues, so many implementations will change this default. The Server header is analogous in response traffic to the User Agent header in client traffic. What questions do you have? Drop a comment below if there is anything I can clarify. Join me next week when we move on to the HTTP profile enforcement settings.
