Hacker's ramblings

Yesterday I was mighty pissed about Oracle's Java breaking my stuff. Then it occurred to me: I shouldn't be using self-signed certificates in the first place! See my post about Certificate Authority setup: Doing it right with OpenSSL, where I wrote "My personal recommendation is to never use self-signed certificates for anything". And there I was! Darn.

I figured, that there must be a way of stop the stupidity and install an own certificate to the network appliance. Then I bumped into ASA 8.x: Renew and Install the SSL Certificate with ASDM, a PDF-document from Cisco instructing how to achieve that. Nice! Exactly what I needed.

This is how to do it. Log into ASDM and go to Configuration -> Device Management -> Certificate Management -> Identify Certificates. It looks like this:

There you can find Add-button:

You should add a new identify certificate. I used the Default-RSA-Key, but Cisco's own documentation says to generate a new one. In case SSH-keys need to be regenerated, the SSL-certificate won't work anymore. In my case I can simply recreate the certificate also, so it is not an issue to me. After you click Add Certificate:

You will get a dialog to save the Certificate Signing Request (CSR) into a local drive to be sent to a Certification Authority (CA) to be processed.

After your CSR has gone trough and you have your certificate in PEM-format go back to ASDM and select Install this time. You will get a dialog:

Upload or copy/paste the PEM certificate there and click Install Certificate. After that you'll have an identity:

Now the next thing to do is to start using the newly created identity. In Configuration -> Device Management -> Advanced -> SSL Settings there is an option to choose an identity to use when ASDM is being accessed via HTTPS or ASDM-IDM.

To get better results from Qualsys SSL Labs server test I did following changes:

• SSL-version is set to TLS V1 Only, that is TLS 1.0 only. 1.1 nor 1.2 is not available.
• For encryption I'm only using:
• 112-bit 3DES-SHA1
• 128-bit RC4-SHA1
• 128-bit RC4-MD5
• The AES-encryptions for 128-bit or 256-bit failed on my box for some reason. If you have them, please use those! The chosen 3 crypto algos provide reasonable security, but the AES-ones are better.
  

After an Apply the new certificate is in use. You can verify that via a web browser from HTTPS-interface or go to Control Panel's Java security settings and remove the self-signed certificate from secure site certificates -list. The ASDM-login will work again.