I use the Let's Encrypt SSL certificate server-side and also have my site set up to go through CloudFlare.
How can I make this work?
(I totally know the answer now, but thought I'd create a question/answer in case others have the same issue.)
In CloudFlare, set
Crypto > "Always Use HTTPS" > Off
I'm not sure what you can do if you need this on. I do my http > https redirect server-side (Apache). I actually never did try it set to On so maybe Let's Encrypt renewal will also work that way...
Page Rules >
example.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/*
Settings: Browser Integrity Check: Off
and
www.example.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/*
Settings: Browser Integrity Check: Off
(Or whatever your subdomains are.)
Related
I inherited a weird situation from a client that I'm no expert at. This client has 3 domain names, the main one being, for example, domain-a.com. They also have domain-b.com and domain-c.com redirecting to domain-a.com. All domains live on the same server.
So the problem comes up because they had SSL certs on all 3 domains and the cert on domain-c.com expired and they need to get a new one. This had me thinking, do they even need certs on domain-b or domain-c if it just redirects? Also consider that the domain-c.com domain is the domain of their email, but as far as I know, the two don't affect each other.
TL;DR: Do you need SSL certs on redirects to a page with an SSL cert.
Yes.
The redirection is an HTTP-level action which happens inside the SSL envelope.
The client needs to establish an SSL connection to the original host before it 'sees' the redirect, then after completing the redirect it must establish another SSL connection to the target host.
So you definitely need an SSL certificate on redirects to a page with one.
If you have requests via TLS to domain-b & domain-c than yes, you need TLS support on them.
There's also a security related aspect in this. Plain text communication to domain-b.com & domain-c.com means a plain text redirect to domain-a.com. Because it redirects to SSL only the communication to domain-a.com is secured. This leaves the redirect from domain-b & domain-c vulnerable to a MITM attack. An attacker can intercept the requests and redirect the client to a different site under their control.
This is not easy to prevent, unless you have something like HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS, RFC) in place on all domains and the visitor visited the sites before or they're in preload list of their browser.
In any case, to make it more secure: Upgrade the client to TLS on their first request to any of the three domains, and redirect to https instead of http when going to domain-a from domain-b & domain-c. Use HSTS with preload and HTTP Public Key Pinning on all domains and you're good to go.
I got several https://*.rest-service.mydomain.com. As the number of services increases, I feel managing SSL cert is costly. I bought a wildcard cert for *.mydomain.com.
Newly added services are placed under mydomain.com with a new wildcard cert and it works well. However, as always, legacy is an issue.
I still have a lot of https traffic to https://*.rest-service.mydomain.com, and its old cert is going to expire.
In this situation, is there any good approach to redirect legacy https traffics to the new one?
Since the client still knows only legacy endpoint https://*.rest-service.mydomain.com, can I redirect the client to the new server https://*.mydomain.com and handle the request as well?
I use nginx as a web server and ELB for a load balancer.
... and its old cert is going to expire.
While you can redirect from ssl to ssl (see the other answer) you still need to have a valid certificate for the host you redirect from. This means the redirection will stop working (or at least cause certificate validation errors) once the old cert expired. To fix this you need to renew the certificate.
Apart from that you must be sure that the services can actually deal with redirection. While a browser handles redirection in a transparent way for the user that is not necessary the case for applications using a REST API. These might expect to get the response directly and not a redirection which they have to follow and resubmit the REST request.
Try this regexp-ed server:
server {
server_name ~^(?P<subdomain>.+)\.rest-service\.mydomain\.com$;
listen 443 ssl;
return 301 https://$subdomain.mydomain.com$request_uri;
}
I have 2 websites on 2 servers, I use the SSL cloudflare
For the first everything is ok, green padlock.
For the second, I have a grey padlock with a warning on it https://lightpics.net
Google Chrome can see the site’s certificate, but the site uses a weak security setup (SHA-1 signatures), so your connection might not be private.
Proceed with caution. These are common mistakes in websites' configurations, but that doesn't guarantee that your connection is secure.
When I disable the HTTPS verify in Avast, it become green.
Someone know why ? I have the same configuration on the both... so, it's my server, my code, avast or cloudflare ?
The problem only came from avast : it MITM your connection and sign it again with an sha1 certificate.
To be sure, check your server with ssllabs.com
Just one more thing : https is not enough to be secure, you should redirect http to https with a 301 (permanent) redirect and use HSTS.
I have uploaded my SSL certificates to IAM purchased from Comodo and evrything looks fine in chrome and opera. But mozilla is giving an error: "Connection Partially encrypted". I am not able gauge why this is happening.
Link : https://www.advisorcircuit.com/
Please tell me what is the possible culprit for this?
and also i want to know , how can i redirect my users to HTTPS ebven if they type http as even if i type http the website loads and opens.
I am using AWS t2.medium instance. So is there any configuration i need to do in my console??
Redirection:
You have a few options:
Block HTTP traffic, only allow HTTPS on the Security Group level ( Not the nicest solution.
Use an Elastic Load balancer, Listening only on HTTPS port. ( Same as above)
The webserver ( most of them like Tomcat, IIS, etc) supports a redirection, so it sends back "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently", then the client browser does the call again on HTTPS.
If you use Elastic Load Balancer with SSL termination ( which is a good practice, less load on your server, easier setup of the SSL Certificate). Then all your traffic inside your VPC goes on port 80. In this case you need to setup your webserver to redirect differently. Instead of the incoming port, the trigger for the redirection should be the based on the "X-Forwarded-Proto" header value, which is the original protocol what the client is using.
For production environment the last setup is an AWS Best practice. ( Of course there are also other solutions)
Your site is running Apache/2.2.29. You can redirect your virtual host traffic from 80->443 in Apache itself. That way if someone goes to http://www.yourdomain.com then get redirected to https://www.yourdomain.com
ServerFault has an post explaining how to use Apache mod_rewrite to accomplish this
https://serverfault.com/a/554183/280448
Also you need to adjust the SSL cipher suites that your site accepts. Your ELB has an option to change cipher suites and you can deselect some there. The two you definitely want deselected are RC4 and SSL3.
Here's the full report if you want to make more changes
https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.advisorcircuit.com&s=52.7.154.196&latest
I have an apache server with multiple named hosts all working fine for port 80 http traffic.
(A VPS with one unique IP address)
I have one domain that has a SSL certificate and that domain is configured to handle both http and https traffic.
However if someone accidentally adds https to the beginning of a none SSL configured URL I get a typical certificate warning error (expected) and then if the user accepts the error (depending on the browser) it displays the SSL site I have configured instead of the original non-ssl domain.
I've read up a bit about SNI, but I don't have certificates for each of the other domains and would rather the server either not respond to the SSL request on anything else but one specific domain or redirect to the http version of the site.
Suggestions please as to how I approach this.
Kind regards, Spencer
For security reasons, what you're trying to achieve cannot work.
The browser (which implements the mechanisms to check the certificate) cannot know whether the user typed https:// instead of http:// accidentally or intentionally. Since it's ultimately up to the users to check that https:// is used when they think it's required, browsers should simply perform the actions requested by the users.
A redirection from https:// to http:// should always start with a valid https:// connection. SNI won't help you much there if you can't have valid certificates for the initial connection.
Otherwise, it would be fair for browsers to assume there may be a MITM attack in progress. Typing in https:// explicitly (or using HSTS) is the only reliably mechanism against MITM tools like SSLstrip, which would otherwise be capable of downgrading (or preventing an upgrade from http:// to https://).