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IBM intends to add significant new enhancements to the two most recent releases, and some of those will only be added to the most recent release. At this time, the most recent releases are 7.2 and 7.3. Requests for enhancements to older releases will be considered, but are unlikely to be implemented.
The size, complexity, and maintainability of the enhancements being requested influenced IBM's business decision to implement them only in 7.2 and 7.3. As 7.1 is being stabilized and its End of Service date has been announced as 30 April 2018, IBM has determined that the requested enhancements will not be put into 7.1.
Can this RFE please be determined in a timely fashion? There is one that was declined inside of 2 weeks of inception. This one has been left in Information Provided status since 13 Jan 2017, being in excess of 8 weeks.
Having given this further thought, I am now of the opinion that it is best for the community to spend new development effort on features for the latest release and future releases, rather than older releases - even those that are still listed as "supported." When 7.1 was released, it contained the latest standard ciphers. Spending development effort to add ciphers that became "standards" after that time, while an important security consideration, would throttle important features for current and new releases. I think it would be better for the customers to spend effort upgrading to the latest release.
I agree with the submitter that current SSL ciphers are very important and required by various standards and compliance agencies, (e.g. PCI-DSS). And, since 7.1 is still supported, it makes sense to spend time on this function..
My request is that V7R1 at the very least should be updated to support elliptic curve cryptography which is being used more and more by banking institutions because of security reasons.
But I would say I would want it to support all the ciphers that V7R2 and V7R3 also support, if there are others as well as elliptic curve cryptography
IBM i 7.1 does support TLSv1.2, but does not support all of the certificate types that are enabled on newer IBM i versions.
For example, IBM i 7.1 does have support for RSA with AES, but does not support elliptic curve so any ciphers containing ECDHE with ECDSA will not work.
Is this request for enhancement to add elliptic curve cryptography to IBM i 7.1?
Although this issue has not impacted us, I agree that a supported OS should be fully supported, including adding support for new SSL ciphers.