Conscrypt Implementation Notes

Conscrypt has made some uncommon implementation choices which it's useful to be aware of.

TLS 1.3 Cipher Suites

The supported cipher suites in TLS 1.3 are always enabled. Attempts to disable them by omitting them from calls to setEnabledCipherSuites() are ignored.

Hostname Verification

Prior to version 2.5.0 Conscrypt's hostname verification (enabled by setEndpointIdentificationAlgorithm("HTTPS")) defers entirely to the underlying platform's HttpsURLConnection hostname verifier.

The default HostnameVerifier on OpenJDK rejects all hostnames, and so a HostnameVerifier or ConscryptHostnameVerifier must be set in order to use hostname verification on OpenJDK. On Android, the default HostnameVerifier performs RFC 2818 hostname validation, so it will work out of the box.

As of version 2.5.0, Conscrypt ships with its own default ConscryptHostnameVerifier and this is used on both Android and OpenJDK. It performs RFC 2818 verification and is equivalent to the system HostnameVerifier on Android 10 and 11.

AEAD Ciphers

Conscrypt's AEAD ciphers do not support incremental processing (i.e. they will always return null from calls to update()). Input is only processed on a call to doFinal(). This ensures that the caller cannot work with output data before the authenticator has been processed, but it also means that the input data must be buffered completely for each operation. This may necessitate splitting larger inputs into chunks; see the BoringSSL docs for a discussion of important factors in doing so safely.

OAEP Digests

Conscrypt's OAEP ciphers (eg, RSA/ECB/OAEPWithSHA-256AndMGF1Padding) use the named digest for both the main digest and the MGF1 digest. This differs from the behavior of some other providers, including the ones bundled with OpenJDK, which always use SHA-1 for the MGF1 digest. For maximum compatibility, you should use RSA/ECB/OAEPPadding and initialize it with an OAEPParameterSpec.

Provide feedback

Saved searches

Use saved searches to filter your results more quickly

Uh oh!