Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Server has a weak ephemeral Diffie-Hellman public key error in Chrome/Firefox

I believe anyone who is using vSphere Web client on version 5.1 would be aware about this error, we get this error when try to connect to web client or any other site having certain SSL Ciphers using latest versions of Chrome/Mozila (so far I didn't see this issue with ie),

Note:- This is a known issue affected the vSphere Web Client 5.1,  it is resolved in vSphere Web Client 5.1 Update 3e and later
This issue occurs due to changes to the web browser containing a fix to combat an unrelated vulnerability that consequently disables certain SSL Ciphers.

When I was looking for how to avoid this for web client or any other site giving this error, I came across the thread about the related issue on Google Chrome Help Forum and the summary is, so far Chrome itself doesn't have any option to disable related setting to allow the sites having relatively week security.

If a secure website gets the error ERR_SSL_WEAK_SERVER_EPHEMERAL_DH_KEY, it means the website is trying to set up a secure connection, but it is actually IN-secure because the SSL/TLS uses a Diffie-Hellman group size smaller than 1024-bit.
This is the problem in the Logjam vulnerability, which affects both browsers and servers:   https://weakdh.org 

In this case, the website/webserver needs to be fixed.  Google Chrome won't use insecure connections in order to protect your privacy.

In my case I am using self signed certificate instead of certificate authority signed certificate.

Resolution:- Google Chrome:- As I earlier said the there is no option available within Chrome to enable you to access less secure sites over https however as a way around we can use IE Tab Chrome Extension it will allows us to open vSphere web client within Chrome.

To use this extension, first go to Chrome Web Store and add IE Tab extension to chrome, now go to your url, you will again get the "Server has a weak ephemeral Diffie-Hellman public key error" Now all you have to do is click on the IE Tab icon which you will find in the right corner of the Chrome window (Highlighted in Blue),
And once you would click on IE Tab icon,

Though it's not an official fix, it still works and would allow you view the web pages without any issues.

In Mozilla Firefox we have an option to disable it by going to following url,
about:config
Here in this config page, you will find a list of boolean entries. Search for below two entries,
security.ssl3.dhe_rsa_aes_128_sha

security.ssl3.dhe_rsa_aes_256_sha 
By default, these are set to TRUE. But you have to set them to FALSE in order to allow the less secured pages.

Reference:  kb# 2125607, Senthil Kumar Murugesan's blog.

That's it... :)


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