please downgrade aes192-ctr to optional
Would it be possible to downgrade aes192-ctr to merely optional? IMHO, if a policy has aes256-ctr, it ought to fullfil the requirement for a strong CTR.
You'd like to make it optional in which policy?
In all of them. I would treat aes192-ctr the same as ssh-audit currently treats cert-v01 variants as merely nice to have.
As far as I know, CTR mode doesn't have any problems. Sure, it doesn't include built-in integrity, but it would still work well as a fall-back. And 192-bit CTR is a good balance of higher security while still having pretty decent performance.
Looking at the Ubuntu 24 Server policy, [email protected] and [email protected] have priority over the third choice (aes256-ctr). I think that means well over 95% of connections won't use CTR mode, since those first two algorithms are wildly popular.
The point is that a policy should fail just because the 192-bit variant was omitted.