Question

I’m unable to disable weak SSL ciphers in Tomcat as documented in many places e.g. http://www.techstacks.com/howto/secure-ssl-in-tomcat.html.
Currently, my connector looks as follows:

..Connector protocol="org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11NioProtocol" port="8443" SSLEnabled="true" maxThreads="150" scheme="https" secure="true" ciphers="SSL_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_MD5, SSL_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_SHA, TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA, TLS_DHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA, TLS_DHE_DSS_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA, SSL_RSA_WITH_3DES_EDE_CBC_SHA, SSL_DHE_RSA_WITH_3DES_EDE_CBC_SHA, SSL_DHE_DSS_WITH_3DES_EDE_CBC_SHA" clientAuth="false" sslProtocol="TLS" keystoreFile="C:\Programs\apache-tomcat-6.0.33\keystore" keystorePass="nn"/>

when I attempt a connection (using IE or ssldigger) I get the following error in Tomcat:

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Unsupported ciphersuite  SSL_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_SHA
    at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.CipherSuite.valueOf(Unknown Source)
    at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.CipherSuiteList.<init>(Unknown Source)
    at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.SSLEngineImpl.setEnabledCipherSuites(Unknown Source)
    at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.NioEndpoint.createSSLEngine(NioEndpoint.java:1141)
    at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.NioEndpoint.setSocketOptions(NioEndpoint.java:1096)
    at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.NioEndpoint$Acceptor.run(NioEndpoint.java:1315)
    at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)

Incidentally, I removed the unsupported ciphers (almost one by one) and the only one I was left with that seems to be supported is SSL_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_MD5

Also, I’m assuming that an unsupported cipher is not related to Tomcats’s specific key pair but more generally to the broadly available ciphers.

What is wrong here?

Answer 1

I figured it out..the comma separated list of ciphers is whitespace sensitive i.e. the culprit is the space character after the comma