> At this point, all the SSL2 problems are conjecture on my part, which
> I
> don't understand. I hesitate to do anything until someone really
> knowledgeable can comment. Re-enabling SSL2 as part of 7.3.1 makes
> sense until we can get a definative answer on the risks involved.
I'm not an expert, but as far as I know the only real differences
between SSLv2 and v3 (which isn't different from TLSv1 from a security
standpoint) are some things to prevent some man in the middle attacks.
Thing is, most man in the middle attacks aren't that advanced. The
attacker will intercept your attempt to connect to the server, do
a handshake with you, do a handshake with the server and just sit
in between. The only way (that I know of) to defend against this
is to use certified public keys and I don't know of a way to do
that with postgres.
In short, I wouldn't call SSLv2 insecure, just less secure then v3. I
think it's perfectly reasonable to phase it out, just not right now.
It'd be nice to have some sort of transition version so you wouldn't
have to switch over all your different client programs at the same time
you switch all the servers. My preference would be for backwords
compatibility in 7.3 and then eliminate it or provide a compile time
option in 7.4. If the client stays with TLSv1 newer clients will only
use the more secure protocols and older clients will still have the same
problems they did before. I don't think that's too much of a problem.
--Nate
