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posted by NCommander on Wednesday July 05 2023, @02:23AM   Printer-friendly
from the ssl-negotations-are-complex dept.

So, I know its been a bit quiet here, but we're working through getting through the last few items relating to cutting over to newer infrastructure. As such, its been working through the bug list, and there's one issue I want to get some feedback on.

Back in November when the infrastructure was upgraded to Ubuntu 22.04, a few users with older devices stopped being able to connect to SoylentNews. This confused me, since we've been using the same NGINX SSL termination setup that has been in use since at least 2016. Well, I finally found the root cause, and as it turns out, Canonical bumped up the minimum OpenSSL security level, which disabled several ciphers, and broke devices not supporting TLS 1.2 or later.

By testing the site with the SSL Labs site checker, it appears anything older than Android 4.0, or iOS 5 is broken. This mostly seems to be devices that are over a decade old at this point, and won't be able to browse the vast majority of sites on the Internet as is. We discussed this internally a bit, and I'm of the opinion that its not worth re-enabling the older ciphers to allow these devices to reconnect, especially since we're working to modernize the stack, and get it as up to date as we can get it. I also believe we had very few users who were actually affected by this, however, as the editors did get a few emails about SN breaking after the site upgrade, I wanted to poll the community, and make sure this is not a more widespread issue than initially believed.

Ultimately, this is going to be part of a broader discussion on what we will and won't support on SoylentNews going forward, and this seems as good of place as any to get the ball rolling.

~ NCommander

 
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  • (Score: 1) by pTamok on Thursday July 06 2023, @03:04PM

    by pTamok (3042) on Thursday July 06 2023, @03:04PM (#1314753)

    A technical solution would be to proxy / MITM the site. Connect to the proxy using http or outdated ciphers, then get the proxy to access the site using acceptable ciphers. It's fine so long as people know that that is what is going on. I'm pretty certain you can do it with Squid.

    Two options:

    1) Be nice and provide a proxy for people to use.
    2) Be not so nice and say people need to set up their own proxy to allow old operating systems and really old and low-cpu power devices to access SN. They might not have the resources or technical smarts to do it.

    The benefit of this approach is that the main site can be completely up-to-date, and if managing the proxy, you can make sure it accesses only SN and not other places.

    There's probably plenty of reasons why this is not a good idea.