DTLS disabled on server?

[Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos]

On Mon, Oct 3, 2016 at 9:24 PM, Peter Brant <peter.brant at gmail.com> wrote:
> It turns out the problem was caused by changing the DTLS cipher
> security level from Medium to High on the ASA. Setting it back to
> Medium has fixed the problem.
> My co-worker noted that with High, the only enabled cipher was
> DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA. With Medium, the following are also enabled:
>
> DES-CBC3-SHA
> AES128-SHA
> DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA
> AES256-SHA
> DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA
> The server is now returning X-DTLS-CipherSuite: AES256-SHA.
> I must confess my knowledge of encryption is rudimentary. Is the High
> selection even reasonable? If so, might it be supported in a later
> version of OpenSSL?

That seems like a problem in ASA (that we will have to work-around
unfortunately). They must have updated openssl, and as you describe
openssl disables the non-DHE ciphersuites for DTLS. However, for DTLS
the anyconnect protocol doesn't really use DHE (or RSA key exchange)
at all. It treats the key exchange as a session resumption based on a
key derived from the TLS session. So disabling AES256-SHA in HIGH
level doesn't buy anything with regards to security for DTLS, it just
makes interoperability harder. Fortunately we are moving away from
that DTLS negotation at ocserv-openconnect [0] to a sane one, that
will not have these issues. Unfortunately we will need these hacks on
the client side to keep the communication with cisco servers possible.

regards,
Nikos

[0]. https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-mavrogiannopoulos-openconnect-00