Disable SSL fallback and use only TLS for outbound connections in .NET? (Poodle mitigation)

Question

I am trying to mitigate our vulnerability to the Poodle SSL 3.0 Fallback attack. Our admins have already started disabling SSL in favor of TLS for inbound connections to our servers. And we have also advised our team to disable SSL in their web browsers. I'm now looking at our .NET codebase, which initiates HTTPS connections with various services through System.Net.HttpWebRequest. I believe that these connections could be vulnerable to a MITM attack if they allow fallback from TLS to SSL. Here is what I have determined so far. Could some one please double-check this to verify that I am right? This vulnerability is brand new, so I have yet to see any guidance from Microsoft on how to mitigate it in .NET:

1. The allowed protocols for the System.Net.Security.SslStream class, which underpins secure communication in .NET, are set globally for each AppDomain via the System.Net.ServicePointManager.SecurityProtocol property.

2. The default value of this property in .NET 4.5 is Ssl3 | Tls (although I can't find documentation to back that up.) SecurityProtocolType is an enum with the Flags attribute, so it's a bitwise OR of those two values. You can check this in your environment with this line of code:

   Console.WriteLine(System.Net.ServicePointManager.SecurityProtocol.ToString());

3. This should be changed to just Tls, or perhaps Tls12, before you initiate any connections in your app:

   System.Net.ServicePointManager.SecurityProtocol = System.Net.SecurityProtocolType.Tls;

4. Important: Since the property supports multiple bitwise flags, I assume that the SslStream will not automatically fallback to other unspecified protocols during handshake. Otherwise, what would be the point of supporting multiple flags?

Update on TLS 1.0 vs 1.1/1.2:

According to Google security expert Adam Langley, TLS 1.0 was later found to be vulnerable to POODLE if not implemented correctly, so you should consider moving to TLS 1.2 exclusively.

Update for .NET Framework 4.7 and above:

As alluded to by Prof Von Lemongargle below, starting with version 4.7 of the .NET Framework, there is no need to use this hack as the default setting will allow the OS to choose the most secure TLS protocol version. See Transport Layer Security (TLS) best practices with the .NET Framework for more information.

Answer 1

We are doing the same thing. To support only TLS 1.2 and no SSL protocols, you can do this:

System.Net.ServicePointManager.SecurityProtocol = SecurityProtocolType.Tls12;

SecurityProtocolType.Tls is only TLS 1.0, not all TLS versions.

As a side: If you want to check that your site does not allow SSL connections, you can do so here (I don't think this will be affected by the above setting, we had to edit the registry to force IIS to use TLS for incoming connections): https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/index.html

To disable SSL 2.0 and 3.0 in IIS, see this page: https://www.sslshopper.com/article-how-to-disable-ssl-2.0-in-iis-7.html

Answer 2

@Eddie Loeffen's answer seems to be the most popular answer to this question, but it has some bad long term effects. If you review the documentation page for System.Net.ServicePointManager.SecurityProtocol here the remarks section implies that the negotiation phase should just address this (and forcing the protocol is bad practice because in the future, TLS 1.2 will be compromised as well). However, we wouldn't be looking for this answer if it did.

Researching, it appears that the ALPN negotiation protocol is required to get to TLS1.2 in the negotiation phase. We took that as our starting point and tried newer versions of the .Net framework to see where support starts. We found that .Net 4.5.2 does not support negotiation to TLS 1.2, but .Net 4.6 does.

So, even though forcing TLS1.2 will get the job done now, I recommend that you upgrade to .Net 4.6 instead. Since this is a PCI DSS issue for June 2016, the window is short, but the new framework is a better answer.

UPDATE: Working from the comments, I built this:

ServicePointManager.SecurityProtocol = 0;    
foreach (SecurityProtocolType protocol in SecurityProtocolType.GetValues(typeof(SecurityProtocolType)))
    {
        switch (protocol)
        {
            case SecurityProtocolType.Ssl3:
            case SecurityProtocolType.Tls:
            case SecurityProtocolType.Tls11:
                break;
            default:
                ServicePointManager.SecurityProtocol |= protocol;
            break;
        }
    }

In order to validate the concept, I or'd together SSL3 and TLS1.2 and ran the code targeting a server that supports only TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.2 (1.1 is disabled). With the or'd protocols, it seems to connect fine. If I change to SSL3 and TLS 1.1, that failed to connect. My validation uses HttpWebRequest from System.Net and just calls GetResponse(). For instance, I tried this and failed:

        HttpWebRequest request = WebRequest.Create("https://www.contoso.com/my/web/resource") as HttpWebRequest;
        ServicePointManager.SecurityProtocol = SecurityProtocolType.Ssl3 | SecurityProtocolType.Tls11;
        request.GetResponse();

while this worked:

        HttpWebRequest request = WebRequest.Create("https://www.contoso.com/my/web/resource") as HttpWebRequest;
        ServicePointManager.SecurityProtocol = SecurityProtocolType.Ssl3 | SecurityProtocolType.Tls12;
        request.GetResponse();

This has an advantage over forcing TLS 1.2 in that, if the .Net framework is upgraded so that there are more entries in the Enum, they will be supported by the code as is. It has a disadvantage over just using .Net 4.6 in that 4.6 uses ALPN and should support new protocols if no restriction is specified.

Edit 4/29/2019 - Microsoft published this article last October. It has a pretty good synopsis of their recommendation of how this should be done in the various versions of .net framework.

Answer 3

I had to cast the integer equivalent to get around the fact that I'm still using .NET 4.0

System.Net.ServicePointManager.SecurityProtocol = (SecurityProtocolType)3072;
/* Note the property type  
   [System.Flags]
   public enum SecurityProtocolType
   {
     Ssl3 = 48,
     Tls = 192,
     Tls11 = 768,
     Tls12 = 3072,
   } 
*/

Answer 4

@watson

On windows forms it is available, at the top of the class put

  static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        ServicePointManager.SecurityProtocol = SecurityProtocolType.Tls12;
       //other stuff here
    }

since windows is single threaded, its all you need, in the event its a service you need to put it right above the call to the service (since there is no telling what thread you'll be on).

using System.Security.Principal 

is also needed.

Answer 5

If you're curious which protocols .NET supports, you can try HttpClient out on https://www.howsmyssl.com/

// set proxy if you need to
// WebRequest.DefaultWebProxy = new WebProxy("http://localhost:3128");

File.WriteAllText("howsmyssl-httpclient.html", new HttpClient().GetStringAsync("https://www.howsmyssl.com").Result);

// alternative using WebClient for older framework versions
// new WebClient().DownloadFile("https://www.howsmyssl.com/", "howsmyssl-webclient.html");

The result is damning:

Your client is using TLS 1.0, which is very old, possibly susceptible to the BEAST attack, and doesn't have the best cipher suites available on it. Additions like AES-GCM, and SHA256 to replace MD5-SHA-1 are unavailable to a TLS 1.0 client as well as many more modern cipher suites.

As Eddie explains above, you can enable better protocols manually:

System.Net.ServicePointManager.SecurityProtocol = SecurityProtocolType.Tls12 | SecurityProtocolType.Tls11; 

I don't know why it uses bad protocols out-the-box. That seems a poor setup choice, tantamount to a major security bug (I bet plenty of applications don't change the default). How can we report it?

Answer 6

I found the simplest solution is to add two registry entries as follows (run this in a command prompt with admin privileges):

reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\.NETFramework\v4.0.30319 /v SchUseStrongCrypto /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /reg:32

reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\.NETFramework\v4.0.30319 /v SchUseStrongCrypto /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /reg:64

These entries seem to affect how the .NET CLR chooses a protocol when making a secure connection as a client.

There is more information about this registry entry here:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/security-updates/SecurityAdvisories/2015/2960358#suggested-actions

Not only is this simpler, but assuming it works for your case, far more robust than a code-based solution, which requires developers to track protocol and development and update all their relevant code. Hopefully, similar environment changes can be made for TLS 1.3 and beyond, as long as .NET remains dumb enough to not automatically choose the highest available protocol.

NOTE: Even though, according to the article above, this is only supposed to disable RC4, and one would not think this would change whether the .NET client is allowed to use TLS1.2+ or not, for some reason it does have this effect.

NOTE: As noted by @Jordan Rieger in the comments, this is not a solution for POODLE, since it does not disable the older protocols a -- it merely allows the client to work with newer protocols e.g. when a patched server has disabled the older protocols. However, with a MITM attack, obviously a compromised server will offer the client an older protocol, which the client will then happily use.

TODO: Try to disable client-side use of TLS1.0 and TLS1.1 with these registry entries, however I don't know if the .NET http client libraries respect these settings or not:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/security/tls/tls-registry-settings#tls-10

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/security/tls/tls-registry-settings#tls-11