Faced with toggles for TLS 1.0 through 1.3, which do you switch on? The defensible baseline is narrower than most default configurations, and the reasoning is concrete.
Disable entirely:
— SSL 2.0 / 3.0: broken (POODLE), formally deprecated by RFC 7568.
— TLS 1.0 / 1.1: deprecated June 2021 by RFC 8996. They lack modern cipher constructions and were already disabled by major browsers in 2020. PCI-DSS has required TLS 1.0 off since 2018.
Enable:
— TLS 1.2 (RFC 5246): the compatibility floor. Still secure when configured with AEAD cipher suites (AES-GCM, ChaCha20-Poly1305) and forward-secret key exchange (ECDHE).
— TLS 1.3 (RFC 8446): preferred. It removed every legacy weak primitive by design — no RSA key transport, no CBC, no RC4, no renegotiation — and cut the handshake to one round trip.
A practical configuration rule: don't hand-pick cipher suites from blog posts. Use Mozilla's SSL Configuration Generator at its "Intermediate" profile, which encodes the current consensus and is updated as attacks emerge. Pin a minimum version of TLS 1.2; allow 1.3.
Further reading: RFC 8996 (deprecation); Mozilla Server Side TLS guidelines.
Bottom line: TLS 1.2 as floor, 1.3 preferred, everything older off. Generate the config from Mozilla rather than assembling cipher strings by hand.
Handshake Papers
@HandshakePapers
Which TLS versions should I actually enable in 2026?
This post was published in the Telegram channel Handshake Papers. Subscribe here: @HandshakePapers.