So this only applies if you build Exim yourself.
+Insecure versions and ciphers
+-----------------------------
+
+Email delivery to MX hosts is usually done with automatic fallback to
+plaintext if TLS could not be negotiated. There are good historical reasons
+for this. You can and should avoid it by using DNSSEC for signing your DNS
+and publishing TLSA records, to enable "DANE" security. This signals to
+senders that they should be able to verify your certificates, and that they
+should not fallback to cleartext.
+
+In the absence of DANE, trying to increase the security of TLS by removing
+support for older generations of ciphers and protocols will actually _lower_
+the security, because the clients fallback to plaintext and retry anyway. As
+a result, you should give serious thought to enabling older features which are
+no longer default in OpenSSL.
+
+The examples below explicitly enable ssl3 and weak ciphers.
+
+We don't like this, but reality doesn't care and is messy.
+
+
Build
-----
This assumes that `/opt/openssl` is not in use. If it is, pick
something else. `/opt/exim/openssl` perhaps.
- ./config --prefix=/opt/openssl --openssldir=/etc/ssl enable-ssl-trace
+If you pick a location shared amongst various local packages, such as
+`/usr/local` on Linux, then the new OpenSSL will be used by all of those
+packages. If that's what you want, great! If instead you want to
+ensure that only software you explicitly set to use the newer OpenSSL
+will try to use the new OpenSSL, then stick to something like
+`/opt/openssl`.
+
+ ./config --prefix=/opt/openssl --openssldir=/etc/ssl \
+ -L/opt/openssl/lib -Wl,-R/opt/openssl/lib \
+ enable-ssl-trace shared \
+ enable-ssl3 enable-ssl3-method enable-weak-ssl-ciphers
make
make install
+On some systems, the linker uses `-rpath` instead of `-R`; on such systems,
+replace the parameter starting `-Wl` with: `-Wl,-rpath,/opt/openssl/lib`.
+There are more variations on less common systems.
+
You now have an installed OpenSSL under /opt/openssl which will not be
used by any system programs.
choose the pkg-config approach in that file, but also tell Exim to add
the relevant directory into the rpath stamped into the binary:
+ PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/openssl/lib/pkgconfig
+
SUPPORT_TLS=yes
USE_OPENSSL_PC=openssl
- EXTRALIBS_EXIM=-ldl -Wl,-rpath,/opt/openssl/lib
+ LDFLAGS+=-ldl -Wl,-rpath,/opt/openssl/lib
-The -ldl is needed by OpenSSL 1.1+ on Linux and is not needed on most
-other platforms.
+The -ldl is needed by OpenSSL 1.0.2+ on Linux and is not needed on most
+other platforms. The LDFLAGS is needed because `pkg-config` doesn't know
+how to emit information about RPATH-stamping, but we can still leverage
+`pkg-config` for everything else.
-Then tell pkg-config how to find the configuration files for your new
-OpenSSL install, and build Exim:
+Then build Exim:
- export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/openssl/lib/pkgconfig
make
sudo make install
will show the DT_RPATH stamped into the binary.
+Your `binutils` package should come with `readelf`, so an alternative
+is to run:
+
+ readelf -d $(which exim) | grep RPATH
+
+It is important to use `RPATH` and not `RUNPATH`!
+
+The gory details about `RUNPATH` (skip unless interested):
+The OpenSSL library might be opened indirectly by some other library
+which Exim depends upon. If the executable does have `RUNPATH` then
+that will inhibit using either of `RPATH` or `RUNPATH` from the
+executable for finding the OpenSSL library when that other library tries
+to load it.
+In fact, if the intermediate library has a `RUNPATH` stamped into it,
+then this will block `RPATH` too, and will create problems with Exim.
+If you're in such a situation, and those libraries were supplied to you
+instead of built by you, then you're reaching the limits of sane
+repairability and it's time to prioritize rebuilding your mail-server
+hosts to be a current OS release which natively pulls in an
+upstream-supported OpenSSL, or stick to the OS releases of Exim.
+
Very Advanced
-------------
git://git.exim.org / exim.git / blobdiff