Can I detect the SSL version that a browser supports?

Question

I would like to display a message to customers who's browser's highest level of encryption is SSLv3. Is it possible for me to target browser settings of SSLv3 and lower? Client or Server code? We will be allowing lower versions of SSL to use our site during a certain grace period. During this grace period, we would like to display a message only to those users that have browser settings of SSL3 or lower.

Answer 1

Not easily. The browser's supported SSL versions are not detectable until the SSL handshake is in progress, and even then only if the browser uses an SSLv2 handshake to allow dynamic version negotiation. If an unsupported version were detected, you would not be able to send a message back since the handshake failed and the connection would be closed before you could send any message. However, SSL itself has an error packet that gets sent during handshaking, and it can specify a version mismatch error.

The best you can do in your own code is support all SSL versions on the server side, let the client complete a handshake normally, and then detect which version was actually used and send back a message if the SSL version is too low.

Or, you could simply enable TLSv1 or higher only, and simply refuse to let older clients connect at all. They just would not get a nice error message unless the browser decided to detect the SSL version mismatch error and display its own pretty message about it.

Answer 2

Firstly, nowadays, you can generally forget about clients that don't support at least SSLv3. SSLv3 has been widely available for many years.

The TLS Client Hello message, sent when the connection is initiated by the browser, should contain the highest TLS version it supports:

   client_version
      The version of the TLS protocol by which the client wishes to
      communicate during this session.  This SHOULD be the latest
      (highest valued) version supported by the client.  For this
      version of the specification, the version will be 3.3 (see
      Appendix E for details about backward compatibility).

Appendix E is of course worth looking at.

(The Client Hello message will also contain the list of cipher suites the client supports, which is possibly relevant for the general idea of your question.)

Of course, this specification is just a "SHOULD", so a client supporting TLS 1.2 could still send a Client Hello for TLS 1.1, but what would be the point? By doing so it would have no chance ever to use TLS 1.2 anyway. It could be a preference box that is turned off, but that would effectively make it a client that doesn't support the highest version anyway. (If you want anything more subtle, you'd need to build a database of known user agents, which will be partly unreliable, and for which you'd need to analyse the full user agent string to know everything possible about the platform.)

Now, how to convey the content of the Client Hello message to your application is another matter, and depends very much on which SSL/TLS stack you use. It might not even be directly possible without modifying that SSL/TLS library or the server you're using.

This being said, you can generally get the negotiated TLS version during the current session quite easily. Since that version is the "lower of that suggested by the client in the client hello and the highest supported by the server" (i.e. "min(max(client), max(server))"). If your server supports SSLv3, TLS 1.0, TLS 1.1 and TLS 1.2, and since the latest version is TLS 1.2 anyway, what you'll get during your current connection will also be the max currently supported by the client. As long as your server supports the latest version, you should be able to know what the client supports at best from any live connection.

If you're behind Apache HTTP server's mod_ssl, you should be able to get that from the SSL_PROTOCOL environment variable. You should also be able to get the protocol from the SSLSession in Java.

(If you are willing to write a more bespoke service, you could pass further details like the cipher suites more directly to your application, like this service from Qualys SSL Labs does, although I'm not sure if it's meant to be widely available or just a test service.)

Answer 3

I'd have to agree with Remy about it being a bit challenging.

However, a good starting point may be to retrieve some SSL (certificate) information.

Something similar to this:

X509Certificate certChain[] = 
(X509Certificate[]) req.getAttribute("javax.net.ssl.peer_certificates");

Another way of getting more information is to retrieve the cipher_suite attribute (similar to the code snippet above).

javax.net.ssl.cipher_suite

I hope this (at least) gets you closer.

Good luck.