3.8 On SSL 2 and older protocols

One of the initial decisions in the GnuTLS development was to implement the known security protocols for the transport layer. Initially TLS 1.0 was implemented since it was the latest at that time, and was considered to be the most advanced in security properties. Later the SSL 3.0 protocol was implemented since it is still the only protocol supported by several servers and there are no serious security vulnerabilities known.

One question that may arise is why we didn’t implement SSL 2.0 in the library. There are several reasons, most important being that it has serious security flaws, unacceptable for a modern security library. Other than that, this protocol is barely used by anyone these days since it has been deprecated since 1996. The security problems in SSL 2.0 include:

• Message integrity compromised. The SSLv2 message authentication uses the MD5 function, and is insecure.
• Man-in-the-middle attack. There is no protection of the handshake in SSLv2, which permits a man-in-the-middle attack.
• Truncation attack. SSLv2 relies on TCP FIN to close the session, so the attacker can forge a TCP FIN, and the peer cannot tell if it was a legitimate end of data or not.
• Weak message integrity for export ciphers. The cryptographic keys in SSLv2 are used for both message authentication and encryption, so if weak encryption schemes are negotiated (say 40-bit keys) the message authentication code uses the same weak key, which isn’t necessary.

Other protocols such as Microsoft’s PCT 1 and PCT 2 were not implemented because they were also abandoned and deprecated by SSL 3.0 and later TLS 1.0.