210-250 · Question #201
Many legacy cipher suites available in TLS are deemed insecure. Which three of the following traits make them insecure? (Choose three.)
The correct answer is A. cipher suites using DES B. cipher suites using RC4 D. cipher suites using MD5. Several legacy cipher suite algorithms have well-documented cryptographic weaknesses that render them unsuitable for modern TLS deployments. AES and SHA-256 remain strong and are not considered insecure.
Question
Many legacy cipher suites available in TLS are deemed insecure. Which three of the following traits make them insecure? (Choose three.)
Options
- Acipher suites using DES
- Bcipher suites using RC4
- Ccipher suites using AES
- Dcipher suites using MD5
- Ecipher suites using SHA-256
How the community answered
(14 responses)- A79% (11)
- C14% (2)
- E7% (1)
Why each option
Several legacy cipher suite algorithms have well-documented cryptographic weaknesses that render them unsuitable for modern TLS deployments. AES and SHA-256 remain strong and are not considered insecure.
DES uses a 56-bit key, which is trivially brute-forced with modern hardware, and has been deprecated by NIST since 2004, making any cipher suite relying on it fundamentally insecure.
RC4 is a stream cipher with statistically biased output and is vulnerable to plaintext recovery attacks such as the BEAST and RC4 NOMORE attacks; its use in TLS is explicitly prohibited by RFC 7465.
AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) is a NIST-approved symmetric cipher with key sizes of 128, 192, or 256 bits and no known practical attacks, making it a secure choice in modern cipher suites.
MD5 is cryptographically broken - practical collision attacks exist against it, meaning an attacker can forge message authentication values, completely undermining data integrity guarantees.
SHA-256 is part of the SHA-2 family, is collision-resistant, and is actively recommended by NIST for use in TLS MAC and PRF operations, so it is not a source of insecurity.
Concept tested: Identifying cryptographically weak legacy TLS algorithms
Source: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7457
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