NSS Tools sslstrength

sslstrength

Summary

A simple command-line client which connects to an SSL-server, and reports back the encryption cipher and strength used.

Synopsis

1) sslstrength ciphers

2) sslstrength hostname[:port] [ciphers=xyz] [debug] [verbose] [policy=export|domestic]

Description

The first form simple lists out the possible ciphers. The letter in the first column of the output is used to identify the cipher preferences in the ciphers= command.

The second form attempts to connect to the named ssl host. The hostname argument must be present. However, the port number is an optional argument, and if not given, will default to the https port (443).

Restricting Ciphers

By default, sslstrength assumes that all the preferences are on, so it will use any preferences in your policy. The enabled ciphersuites will always be printed out before the connection is made. If you want to test out a particular cipher, there are two ways to affect which ciphers are available. Firstly, you can set policy to be either domestic or export. This restricts the available ciphers to the same set used by Communicator. In addition to this, the ciphers command can be used to further restrict the ciphers available. The argument to the ciphers command is a string of characters, where each single character represents a cipher. You can obtain this list of character->cipher mappings by doing 'sslstrength ciphers'. For example,

ciphers=bfi will turn on these cipher preferences and turn off all others.

policy=export or policy=domestic will set your policies appropriately.

policy will default to domestic if not specified.

Step-up

Step up is a mode where the connection starts out with 40-bit encryption, but due to a 'change-cipher-spec' handshake, changes to 128-bit encryption. This is only done in 'export mode', with servers with a special certificate. You can tell if you stepped-up, because the output will says 'using export policy', and you'll find the secret key size was 128-bits.

Prerequisites

You should have a cert7.db in the directory in which you run sslstrength.

Other

For references, here is a table of well-known SSL port numbers:

HTTPS	443
IMAPS	993
NNTPS	563