Can Diffie-Hellman Anonymous be used as a cipher for SSL for one-way certifiate-based authentication

Question

I want to use Diffie-Hellman anonymous cipher for SSL. I also want to use a one-way certificate for server authentication. Is this possible?

Answer 1

By definition, when using the DH_anon cipher suites in SSL/TLS, there is no server certificate -- not certificate at all, indeed, since in that situation the server is not allowed to request a certificate from the client either.

If you want to authenticate the server, then the server you have in mind must have something special which distinguishes it from just any other machine in the Internet. Since everybody can buy the same kind of hardware, that "something special" must be something that the server knows. With a certificate, what the server knows is a private key in an asymmetric key pair (RSA, DSA...). Without a certificate, you can authenticate the server with regards to a shared secret (that both server and client know); see RFC 4279 (when the shared secret is a high entropy secret key) or RFC 5054 (when the shared secret is a password).