SSL/TLS Strong Encryption: Compatibility

This page covers backwards compatibility between mod_ssl and other SSL solutions. mod_ssl is not the only SSL solution for Apache; four additional products are (or were) also available: Ben Laurie's freely available Apache-SSL (from where mod_ssl were originally derived in 1998), Red Hat's commercial Secure Web Server (which was based on mod_ssl), Covalent's commercial Raven SSL Module (also based on mod_ssl) and finally C2Net's (now Red Hat's) commercial product Stronghold (based on a different evolution branch, named Sioux up to Stronghold 2.x, and based on mod_ssl since Stronghold 3.x).

mod_ssl mostly provides a superset of the functionality of all the other solutions, so it's simple to migrate from one of the older modules to mod_ssl. The configuration directives and environment variable names used by the older SSL solutions vary from those used in mod_ssl; mapping tables are included here to give the equivalents used by mod_ssl.

Configuration Directives

The mapping between configuration directives used by Apache-SSL 1.x and mod_ssl 2.0.x is given in Table 1. The mapping from Sioux 1.x and Stronghold 2.x is only partial because of special functionality in these interfaces which mod_ssl doesn't provide.

Table 1: Configuration Directive Mapping

SSLEngine on

SSLEngine off

SSLOptions +FakeBasicAuth

SSLOptions +ExportCertData

Environment Variables

The mapping between environment variable names used by the older SSL solutions and the names used by mod_ssl is given in Table 2.

Table 2: Environment Variable Derivation

Custom Log Functions

When mod_ssl is enabled, additional functions exist for the Custom Log Format of mod_log_config as documented in the Reference Chapter. Beside the ``%{varname}x'' eXtension format function which can be used to expand any variables provided by any module, an additional Cryptography ``%{name}c'' cryptography format function exists for backward compatibility. The currently implemented function calls are listed in Table 3.

Table 3: Custom Log Cryptography Function