Use of boringssl equal-preference cipher groups with nginx

Server NGINX
1

Hi,

I have successfully compiled nginx/1.7.4 with boringssl. One thing I am
not sure if it’s possible already is to take advantage of
equal-preference cipher groups that Boringssl supports. For reference:

https://www.imperialviolet.org/2014/02/27/tlssymmetriccrypto.html

https://boringssl.googlesource.com/boringssl/+/858a88daf27975f67d9f63e18f95645be2886bfb^!/

“… new concept of an equal-preference group: a set of cipher suites in
the server’s preference order which are all “equally good”. When
choosing a cipher suite using the server preferences, the server finds
its most preferable cipher suite that the client also supports and, if
that is in an equal preference group, picks whichever member of the
group is the client’s most preferable. For example, Google servers have
a cipher suite preference that includes AES-GCM and ChaCha20-Poly1305
cipher suites in an equal preference group at the top of the preference
list. So if the client supports any cipher suite in that group, then the
server will pick whichever was most preferable for the client.”

Would this already work with nginx’ ssl_ciphers parameter or would nginx
require further patching to support such grouping parameter?

Alex

2

Hi again,

On 2014-08-18 09:17, Alex wrote:

Hi,

I have successfully compiled nginx/1.7.4 with boringssl. One thing I
am not sure if it’s possible already is to take advantage of
equal-preference cipher groups that Boringssl supports.

[…]

Would this already work with nginx’ ssl_ciphers parameter or would
nginx require further patching to support such grouping parameter?

I feel kinda stupid that I didn’t figure it out earlier. Of course it’s
possible out of the box with nginx/boringssl. I made a small writeup
here:

Basically, you group ciphers in the ciphers list like this:
[ECDHE-RSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305|ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256]

Best,
Alex

3

thanks Alex so what’s the updated way to compile Nginx against BoringSSL
?

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