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Status Future consideration
Workspace z/OS
Categories Communications Server
Created by Guest
Created on Jul 20, 2022

RELATED IDEAS

Enable zERT to Detect Partial/Failed Secure Handshakes

We would like an enhancement to zERT reporting that would detect a failed or otherwise incomplete SSL/TLS or SSH handshake/negotiation in order to distinguish it from a fully unencrypted connection. Right now zERT marks connections that failed to complete a handshake due to mismatched parameters or even a timeout as "unencrypted". This can cause misleading entries in aggregate reporting for ports, leading one to believe that there is unencrypted activity occurring when in fact the connection was never able to pass any data.


Being able to distinguish between failed encrypted sessions and established connections with no security will save time in analysis and followup for security migrations and ongoing compliance reporting. It is understood that the failed connections are not cryptographically secure and will still need to be marked as such, but an additional flag to indicate that encryption was attempted and failed will aid in analysis.

Idea priority High
  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Jul 26, 2022

    Great idea -- I was about to suggest something similar but then I found this one :)


    zERT SMF records are a great source of information as they offer very detailed auditing and profiling information. We use them almost on a daily basis to generate reports as well as to review our systems' compliance (e.g. TLS versions and cipher suites in use, session handling or expiring certificates).


    The focus of this information, however, seems to be on "successful" sessions. We'd highly appreciate if information on a similar level of detail was added for failed sessions. For instance, it would be great to have access to the level and description of TLS alert messages as well as the types of the last TLS message which was sent and/or recieved for a given session. Recently, we had a case where our colleagues ran into problems when they tried to migrate a production system to encrypted Db2 connections. Since they were under pressure to get the system up again (and they did not inform us about the migration in the first place :) ), there was no time to take IP packet traces which would probably have helped us to find the reason for the connection failures. According to the SMF 119.2 records, the TCP sessions in question ended with SMF119AP_TTTTLSCS=X'02'. But that's it...

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