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Follow up on lists.wm.o TLS usage
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Description

Background

On 2025-03-17, we enabled dual certificate support (RSA + ECDSA) and enforced server-preferred TLS cipher suite ordering on both Exim and Apache for lists.wikimedia.org.

Here is the current TLS usage data from Exim (as of 2025-06-27), considering only inbound (<=) connections:

# TLS version usage
$ zgrep -oE ".+<=.*(X=TLS[A-Z_0-9\.:]+)" /var/log/exim4/mainlog* \
  | grep -o "X=TLS.*" \
  | cut -f1 -d':' \
  | sort | uniq -c

     16 X=TLS1.0
   1241 X=TLS1.2
  13882 X=TLS1.3

# Cipher suite usage
$ zgrep -oE ".+<=.*(X=TLS[A-Z_0-9\.:]+)" /var/log/exim4/mainlog* \
  | grep -o "X=TLS.*" \
  | cut -f1-2 -d':' \
  | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

  13883 X=TLS1.3:ECDHE_SECP256R1__ECDSA_SECP256R1_SHA256__AES_256_GCM
    873 X=TLS1.2:ECDHE_SECP256R1__ECDSA_SHA512__AES_256_GCM
    230 X=TLS1.2:ECDHE_SECP256R1__ECDSA_SHA256__AES_256_GCM
    130 X=TLS1.2:ECDHE_SECP256R1__RSA_SHA512__AES_256_GCM
     16 X=TLS1.0:ECDHE_SECP256R1__ECDSA_SHA1__AES_256_CBC__SHA1
      5 X=TLS1.2:ECDHE_SECP256R1__ECDSA_SHA256__AES_128_GCM
      3 X=TLS1.2:ECDHE_SECP256R1__RSA_PSS_RSAE_SHA256__AES_256_GCM

As expected, ECDSA certificates dominate, but there's still measurable usage of the RSA variant.


Next steps

  • Trim accepted cipher suites to match HTTPS configuration standards
  • Disable TLSv1.0 and TLSv1.1
  • Review RSA certificate usage:
    • Plan deprecation if client compatibility permits

Event Timeline

Vgutierrez removed Vgutierrez as the assignee of this task.
Vgutierrez triaged this task as Medium priority.

@Vgutierrez who would be doing the work listed in the bullet points, you or us?

Just an update to see if there is any planned work for this task.
It could maybe be discarded because of T286066: Put lists.wikimedia.org web interface behind LVS and T378028: Replace Exim on VRTS servers with Postfix (or maybe a subsequent task making mailman's new postfix use our existing email infrastructure) which would effectively cut mailman off Internet