https://www.decadent.org.uk/ben/blog/securing-wwwdecadentorguk.html

Ben's technical blog

Sun, 30 Aug 2015
Securing www.decadent.org.uk

Sven Hoexter replied to my previous entry to say that WoSign also provides free DV TLS certificates. What's more, they allow up to 10 alternate names, unlike StartSSL. So I've gone ahead with a new certificate for www.decadent.org.uk and other virtual servers including git.decadent.org.uk.

WoSign sensibly mandates a key length of 2048 bits, and together with the default TLS configuration for Apache in Debian 'jessie' this resulted in a A- rating from Qualys SSL Server Test.

I then disabled non-PFS and otherwise weak cipher suites in /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/ssl.conf:

  SSLCipherSuite HIGH:!aNULL:!kRSA:!3DES

This resulted in an A rating. Finally, I added redirection of all plaintext HTTP connections to HTTP-S (which is easier than working out how to make the virtual server work with and without TLS, anyway). I enabled HSTS for each VirtualHost:

  Header always set Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains"

This resulted in an A+ rating. These web sites will now be inaccessible to Java 6 and IE on Windows XP, but that's no great loss (1 in 1500 hits over the past few weeks).

posted at: 12:59 | path: / | permanent link to this entry