[CASSANDRA-13325] Bring back the accepted encryption protocols list as configurable option

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Low
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 4.0-beta4, 4.0
• Component/s: Local/Config

Source Control Link

https://github.com/apache/cassandra/commit/919a8964a83511d96766c3e53ba603e77bca626c

Test and Documentation Plan

Unit tests

• Assignee: Jon Meredith
• Reporter: Nachiket Patil

Authors

Jon Meredith

Reviewers

Berenguer Blasi, David Capwell, Dinesh Joshi

• Created: 14/Mar/17 00:40
• Updated: 27/Jan/21 17:11
• Resolved: 03/Dec/20 00:45

Description

With CASSANDRA-10508, the hard coded list of accepted encryption protocols was eliminated. For some use cases, it is necessary to restrict the encryption protocols used for communication between client and server. Default JVM way of negotiations allows the best encryption protocol that client can use.
e.g. I have set Cassandra to use encryption. Ideally client and server negotiate to use best protocol (TLSv1.2). But a malicious client might force TLSv1.0 which is susceptible to POODLE attacks.

At the moment only way to restrict the encryption protocol is using the jdk.tls.client.protocols systems property. If I dont have enough access to modify this property, I dont have any way of restricting the encryption protocols.

I am proposing bring back the accepted_protocols property but make it configurable. If not specified, let the JVM take care of the TLS negotiations.