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determining which SSL ciphers to use in server block

Posted on July 27, 2016

I am following along to the tutorial how-to-secure-nginx-with-let-s-encrypt-on-ubuntu-14-04 and on Step 3 the author suggests I allow only “the most secure SSL protocols and ciphers” and then provides ciphers within some code to add to my server block.

I was wondering if anyone can explain how the author came to decide on these ciphers specifically? After searching I found lots of other ciphers such as the ones provided on mozilla.org or a recommended suite from https://raymii.org.

Could I use these ciphers instead? Should I?

Thanks for reading. As you can see I am trying to understand ciphers.



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The most recent cipher suites use RSA, ECDH, or ECDSA for authentication, ECDHE for key exchange, AES for encryption, and GCM for integrity, but a large number of older and backward-compatibility cipher suites also exist.

Source - https://securityevaluators.com/knowledge/blog/20150119-protocols/

https://cipherli.st/ maintains a decent list. Also you can use https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/ to determine which ciphers you wish to use.

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