Consider making ECDSA (P-256) the default certificate type

[april]

I'm not sure if this is the ideal place to post this, but I just wanted to give people a heads-up that Mozilla's future "Server Side TLS" guidelines will recommend ECDSA certificates for the Intermediate configuration level. This is one of the most commonly used TLS configurations for servers across the internet.

mozilla/server-side-tls#178
mozilla/server-side-tls#254
https://ssl-config.mozilla.org/

In our research, we found that ECDSA and RSA certificates were equally compatible with the vast majority of clients across the internet, comprising this set of clients:

• Android 4.4.2+, released October 2013
• Chrome 31+, released August 2016
• Firefox 27+, released February 2014
• IE 11 (Win 7 and Win 10), released October 2013
• Edge (all versions)
• Java 8u31+, released January 2015
• OpenSSL 1.0.1+, released March 2012
• Safari 9+, released September 2015

The reason why we are recommending ECDSA certificates over RSA certificates is that they give IE11 clients on Windows 7 access to ECDHE for key exchange; with RSA they are limited to classic DHE. My apologies if this project already uses ECDSA by default.

Please let me know if you have any questions! Thanks!

[shred]

Thank you for the heads-up.

acme4j does not specify the key type to be used. It supports both RSA and ECDSA. The final decision is up to the user of this library.

However, I will change the code examples to use ECDSA. This will hopefully promote the use of ECDSA.

[april]

Awesome, thank you so much!