19 ms·

Switch to HTTPS Now, For Free

622 points by rodrigocoelho 13y ago

grinnick 13y ago
I used this guide to help switch a site to HTTPS just last week. Very useful and super simple. On issue I did run into (not relevant to the article but anyway) was that Heroku charges $20/month to use SSL on a custom domain.
- ceejayoz 13y ago
  I believe that's because Heroku's on AWS and using ELB, so they have to have an ELB just for you ($15/month).
kemayo 13y ago
It is sort of worth noting that it's only free if you have a dedicated IP address. If you just have a cheap hosting plan somewhere, you'll need to pay them for said dedicated IP before you can set up SSL, generally. I mean, we're not talking a huge amount of money. Webfaction is $5/month [1]. Still! [1]: https://www.webfaction.com/features https://www.webfaction.com/features
- spindritf 13y ago
  You can use StartSSL certificates with SNI (Server Name Indication) which allows you to have multiple sites/domains on the same IP. And really, just get a VPS from Digital Ocean -- be the master of your IP, configuration and fate.
  - druiid 13y ago
    Only issue with SNI is that it has to be supported by the browser. Generally not an issue these days, but something to be aware of. Edit: Actually, I just looked... WinXP still doesn't support it with IE, so, actually it could be a big issue still.
    - onedognight 13y ago
      It's worse than you suggest. XP doesn't have the StartCom root cert unless the user has installed a manual root cert update.
      - eli 13y ago
        I think the root cert was added through Windows Update a to XP few years ago, so there's a decent chance boxes in the wild have. SNI is still a no-go on XP though.
- handsomeransoms 13y ago
  Webfaction enabled SNI on all of their servers in December 2011 [1], which means you no longer need to buy a dedicated IP address to use SSL. In fact, when they made this switch, they switched my server over to SNI automatically and stopped charging me the extra $5/month automatically. Awesome! A small fraction of Internet users on extremely out-of-date system cannot use SNI. If you need to support those users, you will still have to buy a dedicated IP address. I personally don't bother (if you're running IE 6 on Windows XP, you have bigger problems). This is a great guide! I did the exact same thing several months ago and am very happy with the result. Enough with the excuses not to deploy SSL! [1] https://blog.webfaction.com/2011/12/server-name-indication-enabled-on-all-servers/ https://blog.webfaction.com/2011/12/server-name-indication-e...
  - dangrossman 13y ago
    Almost 1 in 5 people on the web are still running Windows XP. No version of Internet Explorer on XP supports SNI. Neither does Safari on XP, the browser in Android 2.x, the BlackBerry browser or Opera Mobile before 10.1. It may be a minority of users, but it's not just "people who are still running IE6". Pretty much everyone would love to use SNI; site owners wouldn't have to pay for extra IPs, hosting companies wouldn't have to worry about securing and allocating them just for SSL use, tons of IPv4 space could be put back into circulation, and CAs would be able to sell many more certs. Unfortunately the group that can't use it is too large to ignore, so none of that's happening.
    - handsomeransoms 13y ago
      I appreciate your detailed response! I should not have been so dismissive of those users. Still, I maintain that the "extra cost for a dedicated IP" is a poor excuse for not implementing SSL.
      - agwa 13y ago
        Unfortunately. it's not always just the cost - too many providers (e.g. DigitalOcean) obnoxiously don't support multiple IP addresses on a server/VM.
ewolf 13y ago
Are there any downsides to these free certs? Do they work in all browsers; is there anything that could be better security-wise? If not, than this is exactly what we need to establish HTTPS as the new standard.
- Nux 13y ago
  They work in all modern browsers, they do not work in certain (very) old versions of curl, wget, android etc.[1] They should be alright for most stuff, especially for personal use. And they're free because it costs them nothing to issue them. [1] - https://forum.startcom.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1802 https://forum.startcom.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1802
- tjohns 13y ago
  There are some minor caveats, but nothing really worth worrying about. Most browsers accept StartCom certs these days, so that's not a concern unless you're supporting ancient systems. The big difference is in how much validation is done. The cheap certs only offer domain verification; in other words, they verify that the person holding the certificate owns the domain in question. Typically via an automated email to one of the contact addresses associated with the domain. The catch here is that you're only allowed to fill out the CN= (domain) field in your cert; the others are blanked out. For what most people use SSL for, that's sufficient. The more expensive certs will go a step further and verify the identity of the entity or person holding the certificate. This entails things like checking your articles of incorporation if your'e a business; things that tend to require a human operator at the CA reviewing your submission. In return, you get to fill out more fields in your certificate. However, nobody ever looks at the details for certs, so this is pretty much wasted money, IMHO. The only point at which the more expensive certs get you something of value is: 1. You pay to get a wildcard cert, which lets you use your cert on as many subdomains as you want. If you actually need it for technical reasons (e.g. you let users create their own subdomains), this might be worthwhile. Most folks won't need this. 2. You pay to get an "Extended Validation" or "EV" cert, which gets you a little green box in the address bar with your company name. There's strict requirements on identity validation to get these, and it's supposed to engender more trust on the part of users. They're also very expensive. Personally, I suspect nobody really cares about these and it's just a racket for the CAs. But opinions vary.
jlongster 13y ago
One gotcha that these kinds of tutorials don't mention is that if your site might be blacklisted if google doesn't say it's been 100% clear of trojans for the past 90 days. I hit this on my domain when I accidentally had an .exe file in my static files. I've had to wait 3 months until I can get the certificate. http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?hl=en-US&site=jlongster.com http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnost...
Zoepfli 13y ago
In the switch to https everywhere, we have barely started. For every HN and wikipedia with https there are 20 websites without (and whether the ones that do https do really secure https is yet another question). Somebody should go through the top 10k websites and make a list, then repeat every few months.
- consultant23522 13y ago
  Well, if you go by % of internet traffic Google is 40-50% of all internet traffic. You could probably get above 99% of all internet traffic with a shockingly small number of sites. While Google, for example, uses SSL it's not like your data is really secure from monitoring there.
- glazskunrukitis 13y ago
  I understand that some time ago there were reasons behind not using https (price, setup, performance), but now you can get a certificate for few bucks[1]. [1] http://getssl/en/ssl-certificates http://getssl/en/ssl-certificates
- ivanr 13y ago
  FYI, in my research, about 10% of Alexa top 1 million sites support SSL. For the configuration of those 10%, see SSL Pulse https://www.trustworthyinternet.org/ssl-pulse/ https://www.trustworthyinternet.org/ssl-pulse/
- cpeterso 13y ago
  Note that Wikipedia supports HTTPS, but it is not the default (yet).
  - Zoepfli 13y ago
    Funny, it is for me: any wikipedia page redirects to its https counterpart. E.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News redirects to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News .
iancarroll 13y ago
If you host with SingleHop, they allow generation of unlimited SSL certificates. [1] [1] Ex: https://ianthedeveloper.com https://ianthedeveloper.com
jakobe 13y ago
I just recently enabled SSL on my business website. It was anything but simple. First of all, I had to get a dedicated server, because a bunch of other sites were running on the same server, and the hosting company doesn't offer additional IP addresses. Then I wanted to get an SSL certificate. I picked Comodo, because they seemed to offer the cheapest full business validation certificate, but then accidentally bought a domain only certificate because their marketing was so confusing. Their friendly customer service walked me through a complicated process for changing my order. To get the certificate issued, it took me a week to collect the documents they requested. I had to make sure my business was listed in the yellow pages, so they could send me an automatic phone call for verifying my number. After every step in the process, they told me to log into their online management area, which was offline from time to time. I had to confirm my email address by clicking a link about a dozen times. Half of the emails were missing the confirmation link. Twice I got an email telling me my order will soon be processed, and nothing happened for two days. I had to open tickets in some online support area or send them emails to get them to continue processing. All in all it took me a month to get SSL working. Now I understand why so many sites do not use HTTPS.
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  If you just want the security of SSL, don't bother with the EV certificate. It's hugely easier.
- dangrossman 13y ago
  I would be willing to bet over 95% of SSL-secured sites don't have business validation certificates. Given virtually nobody visiting your site will know what that means, let alone how to check anything about the certificate you're using, it just doesn't make sense to pay extra for no benefit. A domain-validated certificate costs less while providing the same padlock icon and level of encryption, and takes just minutes to obtain -- pay, paste a CSR, click a link in an e-mail, and you have a cert.
  - jakobe 13y ago
    In my case, I don't care about encryption. On my website, I only offer software for download. No private data. Payment is handled by a third party. The only reason why I want to support https is so that customers can confirm who they are downloading from. Ideally, I'd like an EV certificate, but I can't afford that. So I chose a business validation cert. A domain only certificate wouldn't really confirm anything. (Also, some of my troubles would have been the same with a domain-only cert. The emails with missing links were those for domain validation, and I had to paste the CSR in the management area that was offline...)
handsomeransoms 13y ago
Fun fact about Startcom (providers of StartSSL): they were the only certificate authority that the "Comodohacker" responsible for breaching Comodo, Diginotar, and others, was unable to hack. [1] [1] http://www.informationweek.com/security/attacks/how-startcom-foiled-comodohacker-4-lesso/231601037 http://www.informationweek.com/security/attacks/how-startcom...
- ivanr 13y ago
  You probably meant to say that they are the only CA Comodohacker admitted attacking and failing to obtain any fraudulent certificates. Given that there are over 100 CAs, it's likely that the same person/organisation attempted attacking others and failed. One interesting thing about that incident is that Startcom never released a report to state exactly what had happened, which is in contrast with some other hacking incidents they suffered. If what Comodhacker said was true (that he had been able to communicate with the NSM), then they definitely were hacked -- just not critically.
dimension7 13y ago
Excellent guide but unfortunately StartSSL does not support all top-level domains. I went through the trouble of registering with StartSSL, they even issued a client certificate for my email account at .tk domain, but they refuse to issue SSL server certificates for any .tk domain. Even though this is a perfectly legitimate top-level domain (yes I paid for a real .tk domain, and I fully control the DNS settings just as any other domain — it is not a free web-based redirect domain, which the Tokelau NIC also offers), StartSSL does not let you choose it when requesting a certificate. They have a drop-down of supported TLDs, but .tk is nowhere to be found (and you cannot edit the HTML to submit this domain anyways, it will be rejected by the server). Initially this appeared to be a simple omission, but investigating further revealed it was an intentional decision to not allow issuance of SSL certs to .tk due to "abuse". Quite annoying to have purchased an apparently legitimate domain, only to discover it is considered "second-class" by certain online services. Now I am faced with a decision to buy another new domain at a more reputable TLD, switch all my servers and services over, or find another SSL issuer which supports .tk. CACert appears promising, also issuing certs for free, but sadly they are not widely accepted by browser vendors. A paid SSL authority would likely issue a cert for .tk, but at this point I'm inclined to not use SSL at all, or stick with my own self-signed certs (I mainly use my server for personal services, so wide accessibility is not a major concern, but having a "real" trusted cert would be nice). Does anyone else have any experience with acquiring SSL certs for less popular TLDs? I picked .tk because a short and easily recognizable domain was available, got in before many of the better names were snatched up as in .com, etc, but perhaps giving in and buying a longer domain name at a popular TLD is worth it if it means StartSSL and other services will consider it more trustworthy.
- jakebellacera 13y ago
  .tk domains are probably restricted because they're free to register, thus are heavily associated with abuse. Abusive websites with certs that haven't been caught could be misleading to users. That's my guess, anyway.
- jafaku 13y ago
  StartSSL will also refuse to give you a certificate based on some sort of blacklist of words, which they won't disclose. I remember they didn't even want to tell me why they refused my domain, I had to send many emails asking for more information, until the guy answering finally decided to tell me.
wtn 13y ago
I was under the impression the private key for authentication to the StartSSL site was generated in the browser with the keygen tag, not on the server…
- Tortoise 13y ago
  It is. The website is wrong. Assuming your browser implements it securely, it's no less safe than generating it client-side with openssl.
  - konklone 13y ago
    Oh, whoops. Can you recommend how I should change the text? Anything you can link to to show me what you mean?
    - wtn 13y ago
      My understanding is that StartSSL will, by default, generate a TLS/SSL private key and public certificate pair for you server side. One can manually override by creating a private key locally and uploading a CSR. The site authentication private key and the S/MIME private key, however, are always generated in the user's browser. From my experience (on OS X), if you want maximum flexibility for selecting your S/MIME key size, the browser you should use is the last pre-Chromium release of Opera. It allowed me to select 4096-bit RSA private key and SHA-256 hash algorithm, whereas Firefox, Safari, and Chrome have no option greater than 2048 bits.
tootie 13y ago
Using HTTPS everywhere doesn't really help much. It doesn't help at all if the surveillers either have your cert or access to decrypted traffic inside the firewall. Any PII being sent over the wire should most definitely be encrypted, but encrypting my access to a news site isn't really hiding anything. The requested URL still need to be unencrypted, you'd just be encrypting content that is already availble unencrypted.
- dangrossman 13y ago
  > The requested URL still need to be unencrypted The SSL connection is set up before the HTTP request is sent; that's why the dedicated IP per domain is required, since the domain (Host header) is part of the request as well. The URL you're accessing is not sent in the clear.
  - cbr 13y ago
    Partly. On a modern system with SNI the hostname is sent in the clear. This removes the requirement for a dedicated IP per domain with SSL for those users, but until SNI everywhere you still need one.
- schoen 13y ago
  The particular publicly-available information that people are interested in is privacy-sensitive. It's easiest to see this by thinking about articles on sexual, medical, and religious topics at Wikipedia (or WebMD!). Although the information is public, users don't want others on the network to know that they read it. And on some networks, the content of news articles that we might think of as totally innocuous is considered very sensitive, and the network operator might try to block it. The most familiar example might be news about annual commemorations of 6/4. Using HTTPS provides resistance against content-based censorship because the network operator doesn't know when users are reading the specific things that they wanted to prevent them from reading.
  - bad_user 13y ago
    It can get worse than people snooping on what you're reading ... they can also modify the content. In many places, like at cheap motels or providing free Wifi, they inject ads into content pages or other crap. So how do you know if the content you're reading has not been tampered with? You don't, unless the connection is encrypted.
nilved 13y ago
This isn't strictly related to this post, but I've always thought that the idea of paying a fee for SSL certificates was a bad one. Time spent buying and setting up an SSL certificate would be better spent making your site available as a Tor hidden service.
- icebraining 13y ago
  I'd rather disconnect my web server, it'd take less effort and receive the same number of visitants.
chc 13y ago
Just going to throw out that if you use a Cloudflare business plan, you can just tick a couple of boxes and get SSL for free.
- andrewvc 13y ago
  What, I thought you had to pay? Yup, it says you have to pay
  - chc 13y ago
    You have to pay for the business plan. If you're already paying for that, the SSL is free. Unless they've changed how it works and I've just gotten grandfathered in or something.
    - iancarroll 13y ago
      Nope, they issue it for you. I believe that's pro and up.
- tlrobinson 13y ago
  While I like Cloudflare, it's worth noting you give up true "end to end" encryption SSL normally provides. It's entirely possible for Cloudflare to allow others to eavesdrop on your traffic, and in fact I think the connections between Cloudflare and your servers are normally unencrypted. Basically, using Cloudflare SSL is good for protecting your customers from eavesdroppers on WiFi, not so good for protecting against NSA surveillance. But it's probably better than nothing.
  - chc 13y ago
    Whether the connection between you and Cloudflare is encrypted is up to you. It's right in the same box as the option to turn on encryption in the first place.
huhtenberg 13y ago
Oh, the sweet irony - > SSL’s not perfect, but we need to make surveillance as expensive as possible immediately followed by - > And hey, bonus: more complete referrer information in Google Analytics Make up your mind already. Are you against the surveillance or for it? You can't really sit with one ass on two chairs. -- (edit) Point being is that if you are pulling the anti-surveillance card, then you shouldn't really be siphoning off your visitors data to Google.
- doppel 13y ago
  I wouldn't exactly categorize "everyone can see your data" and "we can now track your movement on our own site" together. The idea of surveillance, in this case, is that no 3rd parties can snoop on your data. If you are actively using a site, it should be under the assumption that they can and will track anything you do on their site.
  - huhtenberg 13y ago
    > no 3rd parties can snoop on your data And Google is what... ?
    - ars_technician 13y ago
      Someone you are willfully sending information about requests to? What's so hard to understand. Just because you let your doctor put his finger in your ass doesn't mean you want to let everyone...
      - huhtenberg 13y ago
        Except with external analytics you are letting your doctor to finger other people's asses. See the difference?
- greyfade 13y ago
  I think the idea is to make MitM snooping more difficult, not necessarily data collection by a third-party. I agree, though, it is kind of silly, knowing that Google has been complying with large numbers of FISA requests.
imaginator 13y ago
StartSSL offer a great service. If you'd rather use the Java Keytool to manage your certs, I wrote up this guide on making it work with StartSSL. https://buddycloud.org/wiki/buddycloud_SSL_setup https://buddycloud.org/wiki/buddycloud_SSL_setup Should just be a copy paste, wait, paste, export job.
espeed 13y ago
Make sure you do not use compression with SSL. Using compression with SSL could make your site vulnerable to the CRIME and BREACH attacks. See... SSL Gone in 30 Seconds - A BREACH Beyond CRIME [video]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIKIXQNFplY&hd=1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIKIXQNFplY&hd=1 BREACH Attack (HTTP Compression): http://breachattack.com http://breachattack.com, http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/39925/breach-a-new-attack-against-http-what-can-be-done http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/39925/breach-a-n... CRIME Attack (SSL/TLS/SPDY Compression): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRIME_(security_exploit) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRIME_(security_exploit), http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/19911/crime-how-to-beat-the-beast-successor http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/19911/crime-how-...
- konklone 13y ago
  SSL Labs does a great job of SSL testing domains and making recommendations: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=konklone.com https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=konklone.com I developed my nginx config based on their recommendations: https://gist.github.com/konklone/6532544 https://gist.github.com/konklone/6532544
  - ivanr 13y ago
    Thanks. We also have a step-by-step configuration guide called SSL/TLS Deployment Best Practices. I've just submitted it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6447518 In the nutshell, it's a continuously updated "everything you need to know" about SSL/TLS.
  - espeed 13y ago
    Instead of using nginx or a Web server for SSL, you might consider using something like stunnel for SSL termination as recommended by 'cperciva: "...for security reasons, I prefer to keep SSL termination separate from HTTP serving" (http://colin.percival.usesthis.com http://colin.percival.usesthis.com, http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2009-09-28-securing-https.html http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2009-09-28-securing-https.ht...). In his 2010 talk "Everything you need to know about cryptography in 1 hour" (http://blip.tv/fosslc/everything-you-need-to-know-about-cryptography-in-1-hour-3646795 http://blip.tv/fosslc/everything-you-need-to-know-about-cryp...), Colin also recommends limiting SSL use to a confined area. Amazon does this. For example, Amazon.com only uses only SSL when you log in, check out, or access "Your Account". Everywhere else Amazon.com uses HMAC request signatures over HTTP, similar to how AWS API requests are signed. See "Signing AWS API Requests" (http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/signing_aws_api_requests.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/signing_aws_api...) To Colin and the other security professionals on HN: * Is limiting SSL still recommended in spite of the trend toward Always-On-SSL? * What are the current best practices and tradeoff considerations of this approach?
chris_mahan 13y ago
When it's harder to get SSL working than to install debian stable on a machine, I'd say SSL is too hard.
- astrodust 13y ago
  This is mostly the fault of the SSL certificate providers, which vary in complexity between the obnoxious GoDaddy and even more obtuse and impossible to deal with. Compounding this, the configuration file formats for each web server platform vary wildly, selecting the correct format and installing it properly can be tricky. Making matters worse, it's very easy to set up something that looks like it's working, but is actually broken on some subset of the browsers out there. These problems can be solved with better standards, better documentation, testing tools, and most of all, providers that actually care about the user experience they're selling.
  - chris_mahan 13y ago
    Can't the providers be disposed of, and replaced with an open-source automated system?
    - astrodust 13y ago
      It's not that they need to be open-source or not, it's that their user interface is absolutely awful. You can set up your own CA but you can't sign for domains unless you're in the proper chain. The ones holding the keys for these are the big providers.
derstang 13y ago
For another point of view...free is what you get http://danconnor.com/post/50f65364a0fd5fd1f7000001/avoid_startcom_startssl_like_the_plague_ http://danconnor.com/post/50f65364a0fd5fd1f7000001/avoid_sta...
- brubaker 13y ago
  I tend to take people that have a running douchey commentary with a grain of salt. Plus he was going for validation, which isn't free and is a pretty obnoxious process regardless of who you go with.
hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
If browsers got fixed to not freak out on self-signed certificates, this wouldn't even be an issue, HTTPS could be a default.
- mcv 13y ago
  But how do you distinguish a self-signed certificate from a MITM NSA-signed one?
  - 0x006A 13y ago
    NSA does not use self-signed certificates for MITM, they have access to certificate authorities to get there own certificates that show up as valid in your browser.
- AnthonyMouse 13y ago
  Sort of. You actually do need to know when a certificate is self-signed because it means the connection isn't authenticated even if it's encrypted. But what they ought to do is to accept the self-signed certificate, show something other than the usual lock icon but do the encryption anyway, and then freak out if the certificate changes before it expires.
  - hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
    The point is, sometimes you just don't care about authority, you just care about the encryption. HTTPS with self-signed certificates is better than moving plaintext over the wire, in the same way PGP is better than moving plaintext over the wire. It doesn't matter that you don't have a "trusted" peer to tell you this PGP signer is who it says it is. As long as you can trust you acquired his key in a secure way (e.g., out-of-band), it's better than the alternative. Plus, MITM concerns over self-signed certs are moot. This vulnerability exists at the DNS level anyway.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- nwh 13y ago
mrb 13y ago
Summary: obtain a certificate from StartSSL. They provide free certificates as long as it is for an individual, not a company's website. Their process to get a cert is a little more difficult that the competition, but konklone.com provides a nice step-by-step guide.
- cpncrunch 13y ago
  Nope, you can use it for a company as well.
  - elchief 13y ago
    If you read their terms, and I have, you definitely can't use the free certs for shopping or banking sites. It's kind of vague as to whether you can use it for a commercial site that doesn't involve shopping or banking though.
    - cpncrunch 13y ago
      I did read their terms, which is why I posted that. Nowhere does it say that you can't use the free certificate for a company. In fact if you read their FAQ ("The certificate is for my company, what shall I do?") it says "even in case he/she decides to obtain certification as an employee or representative of an organization". So it is specifically saying that you can use it for a company website. Also it doesn't say in policy.pdf that you can't use it for banking. It just says you can't have a subdomain with the word "bank" or similar in it. So you could use the free certificate for an online bank, although it's probably not the best idea :) Please don't downvote me just because you didn't read the terms properly. My comment above was correct.
      - xenophonf 13y ago
        @cpncrunch, you need to re-read section 3.1.2.1 of StartSSL's policy: Class 1 certificates are limited to client and server certificates, whereas the later is restricted in its usage for non-commercial purpose only. Subscribers MUST upgrade to Class 2 or higher level for any domain and site of commercial nature, when using high-profile brands and names or if involved in obtaining or relaying sensitive information such as health records, financial details, personal information etc. That said, if you're a business, you pay $60 to get verified for a year, and then you can create as many certificates as you want.
yeukhon 13y ago
StartSSL has some complains in the past. See this (paid user, but why would they provide a free SSL ...?) http://danconnor.com/post/50f65364a0fd5fd1f7000001/avoid_startcom_startssl_like_the_plague_ http://danconnor.com/post/50f65364a0fd5fd1f7000001/avoid_sta...
mcv 13y ago
Is it irony that Safari considers his $0 certificate unsafe, or did he simply get what he paid for?
- aroch 13y ago
  Safari (wel, the OSX Keychain) doesn't include StartCOM in it's Truststore -- which I'm pretty OK with. I revoke it from all my trsutstores
  - gmac 13y ago
    (a) That's not my experience. This site of mine is secured with a StartCom cert, and Safari has always been perfectly happy with it: https://mappiness.me https://mappiness.me (b) Why? I understood they were among the better providers.
    - mcv 13y ago
      > This site of mine is secured with a StartCom cert, and Safari has always been perfectly happy with it: https://mappiness.me https://mappiness.me My Safari can't verify the identity of that website. This is Safari 5.1.7.
      - gmac 13y ago
        Interesting, and a bit concerning. I just checked it on a friend's MacBook too, and that worked (Safari 6.0.5). Perhaps there's been a change at some point?
    - aroch 13y ago
      a) Well, if you setup your startcom SSL cert with the browser, that means you've been forced to add StartCOM to your truststores. b) I simply don't trust them, particularly since they use a keybased auth system -- any compromised computer that was used to setup a startcom cert can download the private keys
      - 13y ago
conductor 13y ago
> As you can see, StartSSL will believe you own the domain if you control webmaster@, postmaster@, or hostmaster@ with the domain name I see a potential vuln here for free e-mail services. If one manages to register one of those addresses he can create a trusted certificate and use it for MITM.
- joosters 13y ago
  Several paid-for certificates from a few CAs do just the same. If you're paying $0 for a certificate, don't expect more than ~$0 worth of identity checks! It also highlights a critical SSL issue; there's really little strength in the concept of a certificate proving the identity of anyone.
- icebraining 13y ago
  That's why no free mail servers allow you to do that.
cpeterso 13y ago
You can also get free SSL certificates from LOLroot CA! http://lolroot.ca/ http://lolroot.ca/
- mmagin 13y ago
  That's dumb. If you're going to install a new root certificate on all your client machines, you could just as well generate your own CA inside your organization and do the same thing without trusting some third party. (Edit: I think I've been trolled.)
  - GoodIntentions 13y ago
    Ya Think? "Self-signed certs as a service! IN THE CLOUD! Need Support for your self-signed cert? 5k/year - 1 (800) 555 - 5549" I wonder if they have an affiliate program
    - makomk 13y ago
      They've got something better - anyone can download a copy of the signing key and set up their own unofficial LOLroot affiliate.
AhtiK 13y ago
> And hey, bonus: more complete referrer information in Google Analytics It's interesting, I did switch to HTTPS for all my sites but Google Search still did not reveal search keywords to Google Analytics from users logged in at Google. If that's what was referred as "referrer information". Did anyone get lucky with getting 100% of google search keywords after switching to SSL?
- slig 13y ago
  They don't provide that anymore, even if you're on HTTPS. I had this same question on a yesterday's thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6438992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6438992
- bigiain 13y ago
  What he meant was that Google Analytics will correctly identify visitors coming from a link on a SSL secured site (for example https://news.ycombinator.com https://news.ycombinator.com ) if your set is SSL secured as well - all browsers strip the referrer header if they're going from an https page to an http one. Google search queries/keywords are a different issue - Google is intentionally making it impossible to see most of those (presumably, they've got a plan about how to sell that information to marketers using Adwords…)
  - AhtiK 13y ago
    Many thanks for clearing that up! I had no idea browsers strip referrer headers with https->http navigation.
valtron 13y ago
As I understand it, (correct me if I'm wrong), https has two parts: 1. Encryption: protects from eavesdropping (e.g. your internet provider can't see what you're communicating) 2. Authentication: protects from MITM (e.g. someone changing the data en-route) For full security you need both; but #2 is much more complicated than #1 because it needs a trusted third party, certificates, etc. It's effectively a barrier to having everyone use encryption. Why isn't it possible to opt for only #1? It should be as simple as adding "Encrypt +All" to your apache settings.
- mikeash 13y ago
  I believe the problem is that it's impossible to distinguish between "the remote server doesn't care about authentication" and "the remote server cares about authentication, but your traffic to it is being intercepted and modified by an eavesdropper who is retransmitting the data without the authentication flag". You can opt for only #1, but virtually every browser will put up gigantic warnings about it because it's indistinguishable from a MITM attack.
  - valtron 13y ago
    Unencrypted communication is also indistinguishable from a MITM attack.
    - mikeash 13y ago
      Right, but it's distinguishable from encrypted communication. We have client-side signals for those things. http means unencrypted, https means encrypted. To do encrypted-but-not-authenticated, I guess you'd need a third URL scheme for it, to know when you're supposed to get that, since you can't shoehorn it into https safely.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  You can't have protection from eavesdropping without protection from MITM, because MITM can be used for eavesdropping (as well as actually inserting malicious traffic into the communication.) Which is why encryption without authentication is pointless (or, worse, illusory security) in most cases. On the internet, your communication is inherently being handed off through a number of intermediaries to an endpoint. If you don't know who the endpoint is, it doesn't do you any good to know that your connection is secure from you to the endpoint.
dendory 13y ago
This is kind of glossing over the point. We all know SSL is good and should be used everywhere. But the simple fact is that to have a fully capable SSL server you need two things: A certificate and a unique IP. There are firms now offering free certificates, but not everyone has the choice to select them. And IP certainly aren't free on most hosts. Sure there are always solutions, like moving to a self hosted model and so on, but it is a significant inconvenience for most.
- jackalope 13y ago
  SSL/TLS is entirely a server/client exchange that has absolutely nothing to do with IP addresses. If you get the wrong certificate, you have either a crappy client, a crappy server, a misconfigured client, or a misconfigured server. For each case, there is a workaround, and that is where the inconvenience lies.
  - al2o3cr 13y ago
    Mostly true now, but not historically true - until SNI [1] was rolled out widely, implementing SSL absolutely required a dedicated IP. Short story shorter, the TLS handshake happens before the Host: header exchange in HTTP; before SNI there wasn't any way for a host that responded to multiple names to identify which cert to use for the handshake. [1] SNI - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication
    - andrewaylett 13y ago
      That's still not quite true -- subject alternative names allow you to put multiple domains on a single certificate. That does raise trust issues if you're doing shared hosting, but it should be fine if you run all of the sites and don't mind them being obviously linked.
zmmmmm 13y ago
Do people trust StartCom? Just curious ... I always wondered why you have all these very expensive cert providers who charge a lot for SSL certs, and then this mysterious company with ties to Israel is handing them out for free? I know it's pure paranoia, but this would seem to be an excellent way to compromise a lot of SSL traffic if you were into that, and the Israelis are pretty famous for all kinds of spying activity that makes PRISM look tame. Just curious what others think about this?
- lem72 13y ago
  This is my thoughts exactly.... Cue Conspiracy Theory
- gsnedders 13y ago
  And how do they guarantee identity for zero cost to them? To actually meet all the CA requirements to be a default trusted root isn't easy.
  - bigiain 13y ago
    Like all inexpensive ssl certs, the only guarantee of identity is "domain validation" -if you can read mail going to webmaster@, hostmaster@, Postmaster@, or the email address in a Whois lookup for the domain in question, they'll provide you with a signed key for that domain. There are higher levels of validation - "business validation" usually involves faxing someone copies of various government supplied paperwork and receiving phone calls on publicly available phone numbers (which is just "outsourcing the identity guarantee" to yellow pages or Dun and Bradstreet.) "EV" validation ( for "green address bar as well as padlock icon" security requires all that plus spending lots of money.
- lwf 13y ago
  With StartCom, you just send them a CSR and they sign it. They don't get access to your key. StartCom passed an outside audit and is included in most modern browsers by default, indicating that they at least trust StartCom. They charge for the work they have to do. So, EV and identity validation cost money. Most "domain validated" certs are basically no work, as you can see from the incredibly cheap prices other SSL vendors offer them at.
autoreverse 13y ago
Globe SSL https://globessl.com/ https://globessl.com/ has domain validated certs at $24 per 3 years. I've been using these since 2011 (starting with one year certs before switching to 3 years later) with no problems.
hzlzh 13y ago
Better to do a `SSL client compatibility test` before we choose it. http://www.ssltest.net/compare/runtest.php http://www.ssltest.net/compare/runtest.php
kijin 13y ago
If you don't have a dedicated IP for each domain, and if you need to support clients who can't use SNI (IE on Windows XP, Android 2.x, etc.), here's a simple solution: Use a different port number. https://example-domain.com:12345/ https://example-domain.com:12345/ is a completely different website from https://another-domain-on-same-ip:32412/ https://another-domain-on-same-ip:32412/. No need for a dedicated IP address. No need for wildcard certs, SNI, or any of that fancy stuff. Sure, it's ugly. But it works with every browser (even IE6), and it's not like anybody is actually going to type that into an address bar. You'll be redirecting your HTTP website to your HTTPS website anyway, aren't you? You can only have two of the following three: (1) shared IP, (2) pretty URLs, and (3) legacy client support. Choose which two you want to have.
- mike-cardwell 13y ago
  A lot of corporate networks only allow machines to connect outwards on a certain whitelisted range of ports, ie 80 and 443. A certificate warning for ancient clients because you're using SNI is a much better failure mode than a connection error.
numberwhun 13y ago
Anyone find and read this yet? http://goo.gl/LWJrAl http://goo.gl/LWJrAl I am a skeptic and just looking at this site makes me question it.
jlgaddis 13y ago
Note that in addition to using it for your web site, you can also use this same certificate for e-mail, assuming you run your own mail server. Long story short: I recently moved my e-mail from Google Apps to a machine under my control. As part of that project, I "redeemed" an unused SSL certificate I had purchased a while back for Postfix and Dovecot. (While I paid for mine, you can use a self-signed one and most MTAs won't complain or refuse to deliver mail, if memory serves.)
Abundnce10 13y ago
And hey, bonus: more complete referrer information in Google Analytics for people visiting from sites already using HTTPS (like Hacker News) If I enable SSL on my website do you think I will be able to get the referring keyword from Google? Now that Google is making all searches secure about 80% of the searches show up as 'Keyword Unavailable'. http://searchengineland.com/post-prism-google-secure-searches-172487 http://searchengineland.com/post-prism-google-secure-searche...
ck2 13y ago
Don't forget to enable ssl stapling which is now available in both nginx and apache and supported in firefox 25 and newest Chrome.
Sami_Lehtinen 13y ago
Because certs are so easy to get, it's better to use fingerprint identification for sites, to make sure it's right one. That's what I've been doing for ages, with https, and smtps. I'll be blogging about it soon.
waaatwaaat 13y ago
Why r u decrypting your private encrypted key? To use for csr request? Can't u do car request with private encrypted key? And why point nginx/apache/watevr at the decrypted private key? Sounds unsecure?
jbarrec 13y ago
Thank you so much for sharing this!!
IgorPartola 13y ago
This is where domain registrars should give you a basic wildcard SSL cert for free when you register the domain. There is no reason why you should get that separately. The first registrar to realize that it is basically free to them to provide you the SSL cert and bundle the two things together wins. I also wonder if advances in DNSSEC will help eliminate various SSL cert dealers: if you have a secure way to prove that example.com translates to a given IP, and DNSSEC could distribute the public cert for HTTPS in some standard manner, then CA's have no reason to exist anymore. See http://blog.huque.com/2012/10/dnssec-and-certificates.html http://blog.huque.com/2012/10/dnssec-and-certificates.html for a decent discussion of this. Edit: even better, if I could provide a secure way for you to communicate with my site over HTTPS without relying on a CA, I could also provide you my public GPG key securely. That way you know that me@example.com really has the certificate with ID DEADBEEF. Of course you don't know that I am Igor Partola is who claims to own igorpartola.com, but at least you can securely associate the email address with the GPG key, which is good enough if you, let's say, only know me as my online identity and only care to communicate with me about things related to that identity. For example, if you found a project of mine on GitHub, and found a huge security flaw in it, you might want to securely email me an exploit and a patch without advertising the vulnerability to the world. It's good enough to have the email/GPG key association without needing to authenticate my real-life identity.
nasalgoat 13y ago
On a side note, which cert provider you go with can dramatically effect your latency times. In testing, we found that DigiCert was 50-100ms faster on queries than our existing GoDaddy certificate, based on the location of their CA hosts. The improved response time resulted in a 15% increase in traffic on our API.
megaframe 13y ago
Been wanting this for a long time but didn't know of a free vendor and didn't seem worth paying for (just for my personal use)... now I got it working on everything but OSX, it just does not seem to want to accept the cert.

622 points by rodrigocoelho 13y ago

I used this guide to help switch a site to HTTPS just last week. Very useful and super simple. On issue I did run into (not relevant to the article but anyway) was that Heroku charges $20/month to use SSL on a custom domain.

ceejayoz 13y ago
I believe that's because Heroku's on AWS and using ELB, so they have to have an ELB just for you ($15/month).

kemayo 13y ago

It is sort of worth noting that it's only free if you have a dedicated IP address. If you just have a cheap hosting plan somewhere, you'll need to pay them for said dedicated IP before you can set up SSL, generally. I mean, we're not talking a huge amount of money. Webfaction is $5/month [1]. Still! [1]: https://www.webfaction.com/features https://www.webfaction.com/features

spindritf 13y ago
You can use StartSSL certificates with SNI (Server Name Indication) which allows you to have multiple sites/domains on the same IP. And really, just get a VPS from Digital Ocean -- be the master of your IP, configuration and fate.
- druiid 13y ago
  Only issue with SNI is that it has to be supported by the browser. Generally not an issue these days, but something to be aware of. Edit: Actually, I just looked... WinXP still doesn't support it with IE, so, actually it could be a big issue still.
  - onedognight 13y ago
    It's worse than you suggest. XP doesn't have the StartCom root cert unless the user has installed a manual root cert update.
    - eli 13y ago
      I think the root cert was added through Windows Update a to XP few years ago, so there's a decent chance boxes in the wild have. SNI is still a no-go on XP though.
handsomeransoms 13y ago
Webfaction enabled SNI on all of their servers in December 2011 [1], which means you no longer need to buy a dedicated IP address to use SSL. In fact, when they made this switch, they switched my server over to SNI automatically and stopped charging me the extra $5/month automatically. Awesome! A small fraction of Internet users on extremely out-of-date system cannot use SNI. If you need to support those users, you will still have to buy a dedicated IP address. I personally don't bother (if you're running IE 6 on Windows XP, you have bigger problems). This is a great guide! I did the exact same thing several months ago and am very happy with the result. Enough with the excuses not to deploy SSL! [1] https://blog.webfaction.com/2011/12/server-name-indication-enabled-on-all-servers/ https://blog.webfaction.com/2011/12/server-name-indication-e...
- dangrossman 13y ago
  Almost 1 in 5 people on the web are still running Windows XP. No version of Internet Explorer on XP supports SNI. Neither does Safari on XP, the browser in Android 2.x, the BlackBerry browser or Opera Mobile before 10.1. It may be a minority of users, but it's not just "people who are still running IE6". Pretty much everyone would love to use SNI; site owners wouldn't have to pay for extra IPs, hosting companies wouldn't have to worry about securing and allocating them just for SSL use, tons of IPv4 space could be put back into circulation, and CAs would be able to sell many more certs. Unfortunately the group that can't use it is too large to ignore, so none of that's happening.
  - handsomeransoms 13y ago
    I appreciate your detailed response! I should not have been so dismissive of those users. Still, I maintain that the "extra cost for a dedicated IP" is a poor excuse for not implementing SSL.
    - agwa 13y ago
      Unfortunately. it's not always just the cost - too many providers (e.g. DigitalOcean) obnoxiously don't support multiple IP addresses on a server/VM.

ewolf 13y ago

Are there any downsides to these free certs? Do they work in all browsers; is there anything that could be better security-wise? If not, than this is exactly what we need to establish HTTPS as the new standard.

Nux 13y ago
They work in all modern browsers, they do not work in certain (very) old versions of curl, wget, android etc.[1] They should be alright for most stuff, especially for personal use. And they're free because it costs them nothing to issue them. [1] - https://forum.startcom.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1802 https://forum.startcom.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1802
tjohns 13y ago
There are some minor caveats, but nothing really worth worrying about. Most browsers accept StartCom certs these days, so that's not a concern unless you're supporting ancient systems. The big difference is in how much validation is done. The cheap certs only offer domain verification; in other words, they verify that the person holding the certificate owns the domain in question. Typically via an automated email to one of the contact addresses associated with the domain. The catch here is that you're only allowed to fill out the CN= (domain) field in your cert; the others are blanked out. For what most people use SSL for, that's sufficient. The more expensive certs will go a step further and verify the identity of the entity or person holding the certificate. This entails things like checking your articles of incorporation if your'e a business; things that tend to require a human operator at the CA reviewing your submission. In return, you get to fill out more fields in your certificate. However, nobody ever looks at the details for certs, so this is pretty much wasted money, IMHO. The only point at which the more expensive certs get you something of value is: 1. You pay to get a wildcard cert, which lets you use your cert on as many subdomains as you want. If you actually need it for technical reasons (e.g. you let users create their own subdomains), this might be worthwhile. Most folks won't need this. 2. You pay to get an "Extended Validation" or "EV" cert, which gets you a little green box in the address bar with your company name. There's strict requirements on identity validation to get these, and it's supposed to engender more trust on the part of users. They're also very expensive. Personally, I suspect nobody really cares about these and it's just a racket for the CAs. But opinions vary.

jlongster 13y ago

One gotcha that these kinds of tutorials don't mention is that if your site might be blacklisted if google doesn't say it's been 100% clear of trojans for the past 90 days. I hit this on my domain when I accidentally had an .exe file in my static files. I've had to wait 3 months until I can get the certificate. http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?hl=en-US&site=jlongster.com http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnost...

Zoepfli 13y ago

In the switch to https everywhere, we have barely started. For every HN and wikipedia with https there are 20 websites without (and whether the ones that do https do really secure https is yet another question). Somebody should go through the top 10k websites and make a list, then repeat every few months.

consultant23522 13y ago
Well, if you go by % of internet traffic Google is 40-50% of all internet traffic. You could probably get above 99% of all internet traffic with a shockingly small number of sites. While Google, for example, uses SSL it's not like your data is really secure from monitoring there.
glazskunrukitis 13y ago
I understand that some time ago there were reasons behind not using https (price, setup, performance), but now you can get a certificate for few bucks[1]. [1] http://getssl/en/ssl-certificates http://getssl/en/ssl-certificates
ivanr 13y ago
FYI, in my research, about 10% of Alexa top 1 million sites support SSL. For the configuration of those 10%, see SSL Pulse https://www.trustworthyinternet.org/ssl-pulse/ https://www.trustworthyinternet.org/ssl-pulse/
cpeterso 13y ago
Note that Wikipedia supports HTTPS, but it is not the default (yet).
- Zoepfli 13y ago
  Funny, it is for me: any wikipedia page redirects to its https counterpart. E.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News redirects to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News .

iancarroll 13y ago

If you host with SingleHop, they allow generation of unlimited SSL certificates. [1] [1] Ex: https://ianthedeveloper.com https://ianthedeveloper.com

jakobe 13y ago

I just recently enabled SSL on my business website. It was anything but simple. First of all, I had to get a dedicated server, because a bunch of other sites were running on the same server, and the hosting company doesn't offer additional IP addresses. Then I wanted to get an SSL certificate. I picked Comodo, because they seemed to offer the cheapest full business validation certificate, but then accidentally bought a domain only certificate because their marketing was so confusing. Their friendly customer service walked me through a complicated process for changing my order. To get the certificate issued, it took me a week to collect the documents they requested. I had to make sure my business was listed in the yellow pages, so they could send me an automatic phone call for verifying my number. After every step in the process, they told me to log into their online management area, which was offline from time to time. I had to confirm my email address by clicking a link about a dozen times. Half of the emails were missing the confirmation link. Twice I got an email telling me my order will soon be processed, and nothing happened for two days. I had to open tickets in some online support area or send them emails to get them to continue processing. All in all it took me a month to get SSL working. Now I understand why so many sites do not use HTTPS.

jiggy2011 13y ago
If you just want the security of SSL, don't bother with the EV certificate. It's hugely easier.
dangrossman 13y ago
I would be willing to bet over 95% of SSL-secured sites don't have business validation certificates. Given virtually nobody visiting your site will know what that means, let alone how to check anything about the certificate you're using, it just doesn't make sense to pay extra for no benefit. A domain-validated certificate costs less while providing the same padlock icon and level of encryption, and takes just minutes to obtain -- pay, paste a CSR, click a link in an e-mail, and you have a cert.
- jakobe 13y ago
  In my case, I don't care about encryption. On my website, I only offer software for download. No private data. Payment is handled by a third party. The only reason why I want to support https is so that customers can confirm who they are downloading from. Ideally, I'd like an EV certificate, but I can't afford that. So I chose a business validation cert. A domain only certificate wouldn't really confirm anything. (Also, some of my troubles would have been the same with a domain-only cert. The emails with missing links were those for domain validation, and I had to paste the CSR in the management area that was offline...)

handsomeransoms 13y ago

Fun fact about Startcom (providers of StartSSL): they were the only certificate authority that the "Comodohacker" responsible for breaching Comodo, Diginotar, and others, was unable to hack. [1] [1] http://www.informationweek.com/security/attacks/how-startcom-foiled-comodohacker-4-lesso/231601037 http://www.informationweek.com/security/attacks/how-startcom...

ivanr 13y ago
You probably meant to say that they are the only CA Comodohacker admitted attacking and failing to obtain any fraudulent certificates. Given that there are over 100 CAs, it's likely that the same person/organisation attempted attacking others and failed. One interesting thing about that incident is that Startcom never released a report to state exactly what had happened, which is in contrast with some other hacking incidents they suffered. If what Comodhacker said was true (that he had been able to communicate with the NSM), then they definitely were hacked -- just not critically.

dimension7 13y ago

Excellent guide but unfortunately StartSSL does not support all top-level domains. I went through the trouble of registering with StartSSL, they even issued a client certificate for my email account at .tk domain, but they refuse to issue SSL server certificates for any .tk domain. Even though this is a perfectly legitimate top-level domain (yes I paid for a real .tk domain, and I fully control the DNS settings just as any other domain — it is not a free web-based redirect domain, which the Tokelau NIC also offers), StartSSL does not let you choose it when requesting a certificate. They have a drop-down of supported TLDs, but .tk is nowhere to be found (and you cannot edit the HTML to submit this domain anyways, it will be rejected by the server). Initially this appeared to be a simple omission, but investigating further revealed it was an intentional decision to not allow issuance of SSL certs to .tk due to "abuse". Quite annoying to have purchased an apparently legitimate domain, only to discover it is considered "second-class" by certain online services. Now I am faced with a decision to buy another new domain at a more reputable TLD, switch all my servers and services over, or find another SSL issuer which supports .tk. CACert appears promising, also issuing certs for free, but sadly they are not widely accepted by browser vendors. A paid SSL authority would likely issue a cert for .tk, but at this point I'm inclined to not use SSL at all, or stick with my own self-signed certs (I mainly use my server for personal services, so wide accessibility is not a major concern, but having a "real" trusted cert would be nice). Does anyone else have any experience with acquiring SSL certs for less popular TLDs? I picked .tk because a short and easily recognizable domain was available, got in before many of the better names were snatched up as in .com, etc, but perhaps giving in and buying a longer domain name at a popular TLD is worth it if it means StartSSL and other services will consider it more trustworthy.

jakebellacera 13y ago
.tk domains are probably restricted because they're free to register, thus are heavily associated with abuse. Abusive websites with certs that haven't been caught could be misleading to users. That's my guess, anyway.
jafaku 13y ago
StartSSL will also refuse to give you a certificate based on some sort of blacklist of words, which they won't disclose. I remember they didn't even want to tell me why they refused my domain, I had to send many emails asking for more information, until the guy answering finally decided to tell me.

wtn 13y ago

I was under the impression the private key for authentication to the StartSSL site was generated in the browser with the keygen tag, not on the server…

Tortoise 13y ago
It is. The website is wrong. Assuming your browser implements it securely, it's no less safe than generating it client-side with openssl.
- konklone 13y ago
  Oh, whoops. Can you recommend how I should change the text? Anything you can link to to show me what you mean?
  - wtn 13y ago
    My understanding is that StartSSL will, by default, generate a TLS/SSL private key and public certificate pair for you server side. One can manually override by creating a private key locally and uploading a CSR. The site authentication private key and the S/MIME private key, however, are always generated in the user's browser. From my experience (on OS X), if you want maximum flexibility for selecting your S/MIME key size, the browser you should use is the last pre-Chromium release of Opera. It allowed me to select 4096-bit RSA private key and SHA-256 hash algorithm, whereas Firefox, Safari, and Chrome have no option greater than 2048 bits.

tootie 13y ago

Using HTTPS everywhere doesn't really help much. It doesn't help at all if the surveillers either have your cert or access to decrypted traffic inside the firewall. Any PII being sent over the wire should most definitely be encrypted, but encrypting my access to a news site isn't really hiding anything. The requested URL still need to be unencrypted, you'd just be encrypting content that is already availble unencrypted.

dangrossman 13y ago
> The requested URL still need to be unencrypted The SSL connection is set up before the HTTP request is sent; that's why the dedicated IP per domain is required, since the domain (Host header) is part of the request as well. The URL you're accessing is not sent in the clear.
- cbr 13y ago
  Partly. On a modern system with SNI the hostname is sent in the clear. This removes the requirement for a dedicated IP per domain with SSL for those users, but until SNI everywhere you still need one.
schoen 13y ago
The particular publicly-available information that people are interested in is privacy-sensitive. It's easiest to see this by thinking about articles on sexual, medical, and religious topics at Wikipedia (or WebMD!). Although the information is public, users don't want others on the network to know that they read it. And on some networks, the content of news articles that we might think of as totally innocuous is considered very sensitive, and the network operator might try to block it. The most familiar example might be news about annual commemorations of 6/4. Using HTTPS provides resistance against content-based censorship because the network operator doesn't know when users are reading the specific things that they wanted to prevent them from reading.
- bad_user 13y ago
  It can get worse than people snooping on what you're reading ... they can also modify the content. In many places, like at cheap motels or providing free Wifi, they inject ads into content pages or other crap. So how do you know if the content you're reading has not been tampered with? You don't, unless the connection is encrypted.

nilved 13y ago

This isn't strictly related to this post, but I've always thought that the idea of paying a fee for SSL certificates was a bad one. Time spent buying and setting up an SSL certificate would be better spent making your site available as a Tor hidden service.

icebraining 13y ago
I'd rather disconnect my web server, it'd take less effort and receive the same number of visitants.

chc 13y ago

Just going to throw out that if you use a Cloudflare business plan, you can just tick a couple of boxes and get SSL for free.

andrewvc 13y ago
What, I thought you had to pay? Yup, it says you have to pay
- chc 13y ago
  You have to pay for the business plan. If you're already paying for that, the SSL is free. Unless they've changed how it works and I've just gotten grandfathered in or something.
  - iancarroll 13y ago
    Nope, they issue it for you. I believe that's pro and up.
tlrobinson 13y ago
While I like Cloudflare, it's worth noting you give up true "end to end" encryption SSL normally provides. It's entirely possible for Cloudflare to allow others to eavesdrop on your traffic, and in fact I think the connections between Cloudflare and your servers are normally unencrypted. Basically, using Cloudflare SSL is good for protecting your customers from eavesdroppers on WiFi, not so good for protecting against NSA surveillance. But it's probably better than nothing.
- chc 13y ago
  Whether the connection between you and Cloudflare is encrypted is up to you. It's right in the same box as the option to turn on encryption in the first place.

huhtenberg 13y ago

Oh, the sweet irony - > SSL’s not perfect, but we need to make surveillance as expensive as possible immediately followed by - > And hey, bonus: more complete referrer information in Google Analytics Make up your mind already. Are you against the surveillance or for it? You can't really sit with one ass on two chairs. -- (edit) Point being is that if you are pulling the anti-surveillance card, then you shouldn't really be siphoning off your visitors data to Google.

doppel 13y ago
I wouldn't exactly categorize "everyone can see your data" and "we can now track your movement on our own site" together. The idea of surveillance, in this case, is that no 3rd parties can snoop on your data. If you are actively using a site, it should be under the assumption that they can and will track anything you do on their site.
- huhtenberg 13y ago
  > no 3rd parties can snoop on your data And Google is what... ?
  - ars_technician 13y ago
    Someone you are willfully sending information about requests to? What's so hard to understand. Just because you let your doctor put his finger in your ass doesn't mean you want to let everyone...
    - huhtenberg 13y ago
      Except with external analytics you are letting your doctor to finger other people's asses. See the difference?
greyfade 13y ago
I think the idea is to make MitM snooping more difficult, not necessarily data collection by a third-party. I agree, though, it is kind of silly, knowing that Google has been complying with large numbers of FISA requests.

imaginator 13y ago

StartSSL offer a great service. If you'd rather use the Java Keytool to manage your certs, I wrote up this guide on making it work with StartSSL. https://buddycloud.org/wiki/buddycloud_SSL_setup https://buddycloud.org/wiki/buddycloud_SSL_setup Should just be a copy paste, wait, paste, export job.

espeed 13y ago

Make sure you do not use compression with SSL. Using compression with SSL could make your site vulnerable to the CRIME and BREACH attacks. See... SSL Gone in 30 Seconds - A BREACH Beyond CRIME [video]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIKIXQNFplY&hd=1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIKIXQNFplY&hd=1 BREACH Attack (HTTP Compression): http://breachattack.com http://breachattack.com, http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/39925/breach-a-new-attack-against-http-what-can-be-done http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/39925/breach-a-n... CRIME Attack (SSL/TLS/SPDY Compression): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRIME_(security_exploit) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRIME_(security_exploit), http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/19911/crime-how-to-beat-the-beast-successor http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/19911/crime-how-...

konklone 13y ago
SSL Labs does a great job of SSL testing domains and making recommendations: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=konklone.com https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=konklone.com I developed my nginx config based on their recommendations: https://gist.github.com/konklone/6532544 https://gist.github.com/konklone/6532544
- ivanr 13y ago
  Thanks. We also have a step-by-step configuration guide called SSL/TLS Deployment Best Practices. I've just submitted it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6447518 In the nutshell, it's a continuously updated "everything you need to know" about SSL/TLS.
- espeed 13y ago
  Instead of using nginx or a Web server for SSL, you might consider using something like stunnel for SSL termination as recommended by 'cperciva: "...for security reasons, I prefer to keep SSL termination separate from HTTP serving" (http://colin.percival.usesthis.com http://colin.percival.usesthis.com, http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2009-09-28-securing-https.html http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2009-09-28-securing-https.ht...). In his 2010 talk "Everything you need to know about cryptography in 1 hour" (http://blip.tv/fosslc/everything-you-need-to-know-about-cryptography-in-1-hour-3646795 http://blip.tv/fosslc/everything-you-need-to-know-about-cryp...), Colin also recommends limiting SSL use to a confined area. Amazon does this. For example, Amazon.com only uses only SSL when you log in, check out, or access "Your Account". Everywhere else Amazon.com uses HMAC request signatures over HTTP, similar to how AWS API requests are signed. See "Signing AWS API Requests" (http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/signing_aws_api_requests.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/signing_aws_api...) To Colin and the other security professionals on HN: * Is limiting SSL still recommended in spite of the trend toward Always-On-SSL? * What are the current best practices and tradeoff considerations of this approach?

chris_mahan 13y ago

When it's harder to get SSL working than to install debian stable on a machine, I'd say SSL is too hard.

astrodust 13y ago
This is mostly the fault of the SSL certificate providers, which vary in complexity between the obnoxious GoDaddy and even more obtuse and impossible to deal with. Compounding this, the configuration file formats for each web server platform vary wildly, selecting the correct format and installing it properly can be tricky. Making matters worse, it's very easy to set up something that looks like it's working, but is actually broken on some subset of the browsers out there. These problems can be solved with better standards, better documentation, testing tools, and most of all, providers that actually care about the user experience they're selling.
- chris_mahan 13y ago
  Can't the providers be disposed of, and replaced with an open-source automated system?
  - astrodust 13y ago
    It's not that they need to be open-source or not, it's that their user interface is absolutely awful. You can set up your own CA but you can't sign for domains unless you're in the proper chain. The ones holding the keys for these are the big providers.

derstang 13y ago

For another point of view...free is what you get http://danconnor.com/post/50f65364a0fd5fd1f7000001/avoid_startcom_startssl_like_the_plague_ http://danconnor.com/post/50f65364a0fd5fd1f7000001/avoid_sta...

brubaker 13y ago
I tend to take people that have a running douchey commentary with a grain of salt. Plus he was going for validation, which isn't free and is a pretty obnoxious process regardless of who you go with.

hcarvalhoalves 13y ago

If browsers got fixed to not freak out on self-signed certificates, this wouldn't even be an issue, HTTPS could be a default.

mcv 13y ago
But how do you distinguish a self-signed certificate from a MITM NSA-signed one?
- 0x006A 13y ago
  NSA does not use self-signed certificates for MITM, they have access to certificate authorities to get there own certificates that show up as valid in your browser.
AnthonyMouse 13y ago
Sort of. You actually do need to know when a certificate is self-signed because it means the connection isn't authenticated even if it's encrypted. But what they ought to do is to accept the self-signed certificate, show something other than the usual lock icon but do the encryption anyway, and then freak out if the certificate changes before it expires.
- hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
  The point is, sometimes you just don't care about authority, you just care about the encryption. HTTPS with self-signed certificates is better than moving plaintext over the wire, in the same way PGP is better than moving plaintext over the wire. It doesn't matter that you don't have a "trusted" peer to tell you this PGP signer is who it says it is. As long as you can trust you acquired his key in a secure way (e.g., out-of-band), it's better than the alternative. Plus, MITM concerns over self-signed certs are moot. This vulnerability exists at the DNS level anyway.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
nwh 13y ago

mrb 13y ago

Summary: obtain a certificate from StartSSL. They provide free certificates as long as it is for an individual, not a company's website. Their process to get a cert is a little more difficult that the competition, but konklone.com provides a nice step-by-step guide.

cpncrunch 13y ago
Nope, you can use it for a company as well.
- elchief 13y ago
  If you read their terms, and I have, you definitely can't use the free certs for shopping or banking sites. It's kind of vague as to whether you can use it for a commercial site that doesn't involve shopping or banking though.
  - cpncrunch 13y ago
    I did read their terms, which is why I posted that. Nowhere does it say that you can't use the free certificate for a company. In fact if you read their FAQ ("The certificate is for my company, what shall I do?") it says "even in case he/she decides to obtain certification as an employee or representative of an organization". So it is specifically saying that you can use it for a company website. Also it doesn't say in policy.pdf that you can't use it for banking. It just says you can't have a subdomain with the word "bank" or similar in it. So you could use the free certificate for an online bank, although it's probably not the best idea :) Please don't downvote me just because you didn't read the terms properly. My comment above was correct.
    - xenophonf 13y ago
      @cpncrunch, you need to re-read section 3.1.2.1 of StartSSL's policy: Class 1 certificates are limited to client and server certificates, whereas the later is restricted in its usage for non-commercial purpose only. Subscribers MUST upgrade to Class 2 or higher level for any domain and site of commercial nature, when using high-profile brands and names or if involved in obtaining or relaying sensitive information such as health records, financial details, personal information etc. That said, if you're a business, you pay $60 to get verified for a year, and then you can create as many certificates as you want.

yeukhon 13y ago

StartSSL has some complains in the past. See this (paid user, but why would they provide a free SSL ...?) http://danconnor.com/post/50f65364a0fd5fd1f7000001/avoid_startcom_startssl_like_the_plague_ http://danconnor.com/post/50f65364a0fd5fd1f7000001/avoid_sta...

mcv 13y ago

Is it irony that Safari considers his $0 certificate unsafe, or did he simply get what he paid for?

aroch 13y ago
Safari (wel, the OSX Keychain) doesn't include StartCOM in it's Truststore -- which I'm pretty OK with. I revoke it from all my trsutstores
- gmac 13y ago
  (a) That's not my experience. This site of mine is secured with a StartCom cert, and Safari has always been perfectly happy with it: https://mappiness.me https://mappiness.me (b) Why? I understood they were among the better providers.
  - mcv 13y ago
    > This site of mine is secured with a StartCom cert, and Safari has always been perfectly happy with it: https://mappiness.me https://mappiness.me My Safari can't verify the identity of that website. This is Safari 5.1.7.
    - gmac 13y ago
      Interesting, and a bit concerning. I just checked it on a friend's MacBook too, and that worked (Safari 6.0.5). Perhaps there's been a change at some point?
  - aroch 13y ago
    a) Well, if you setup your startcom SSL cert with the browser, that means you've been forced to add StartCOM to your truststores. b) I simply don't trust them, particularly since they use a keybased auth system -- any compromised computer that was used to setup a startcom cert can download the private keys
    - 13y ago

conductor 13y ago

> As you can see, StartSSL will believe you own the domain if you control webmaster@, postmaster@, or hostmaster@ with the domain name I see a potential vuln here for free e-mail services. If one manages to register one of those addresses he can create a trusted certificate and use it for MITM.

joosters 13y ago
Several paid-for certificates from a few CAs do just the same. If you're paying $0 for a certificate, don't expect more than ~$0 worth of identity checks! It also highlights a critical SSL issue; there's really little strength in the concept of a certificate proving the identity of anyone.
icebraining 13y ago
That's why no free mail servers allow you to do that.

cpeterso 13y ago

You can also get free SSL certificates from LOLroot CA! http://lolroot.ca/ http://lolroot.ca/

mmagin 13y ago
That's dumb. If you're going to install a new root certificate on all your client machines, you could just as well generate your own CA inside your organization and do the same thing without trusting some third party. (Edit: I think I've been trolled.)
- GoodIntentions 13y ago
  Ya Think? "Self-signed certs as a service! IN THE CLOUD! Need Support for your self-signed cert? 5k/year - 1 (800) 555 - 5549" I wonder if they have an affiliate program
  - makomk 13y ago
    They've got something better - anyone can download a copy of the signing key and set up their own unofficial LOLroot affiliate.

AhtiK 13y ago

> And hey, bonus: more complete referrer information in Google Analytics It's interesting, I did switch to HTTPS for all my sites but Google Search still did not reveal search keywords to Google Analytics from users logged in at Google. If that's what was referred as "referrer information". Did anyone get lucky with getting 100% of google search keywords after switching to SSL?

slig 13y ago
They don't provide that anymore, even if you're on HTTPS. I had this same question on a yesterday's thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6438992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6438992
bigiain 13y ago
What he meant was that Google Analytics will correctly identify visitors coming from a link on a SSL secured site (for example https://news.ycombinator.com https://news.ycombinator.com ) if your set is SSL secured as well - all browsers strip the referrer header if they're going from an https page to an http one. Google search queries/keywords are a different issue - Google is intentionally making it impossible to see most of those (presumably, they've got a plan about how to sell that information to marketers using Adwords…)
- AhtiK 13y ago
  Many thanks for clearing that up! I had no idea browsers strip referrer headers with https->http navigation.

valtron 13y ago

As I understand it, (correct me if I'm wrong), https has two parts: 1. Encryption: protects from eavesdropping (e.g. your internet provider can't see what you're communicating) 2. Authentication: protects from MITM (e.g. someone changing the data en-route) For full security you need both; but #2 is much more complicated than #1 because it needs a trusted third party, certificates, etc. It's effectively a barrier to having everyone use encryption. Why isn't it possible to opt for only #1? It should be as simple as adding "Encrypt +All" to your apache settings.

mikeash 13y ago
I believe the problem is that it's impossible to distinguish between "the remote server doesn't care about authentication" and "the remote server cares about authentication, but your traffic to it is being intercepted and modified by an eavesdropper who is retransmitting the data without the authentication flag". You can opt for only #1, but virtually every browser will put up gigantic warnings about it because it's indistinguishable from a MITM attack.
- valtron 13y ago
  Unencrypted communication is also indistinguishable from a MITM attack.
  - mikeash 13y ago
    Right, but it's distinguishable from encrypted communication. We have client-side signals for those things. http means unencrypted, https means encrypted. To do encrypted-but-not-authenticated, I guess you'd need a third URL scheme for it, to know when you're supposed to get that, since you can't shoehorn it into https safely.
dragonwriter 13y ago
You can't have protection from eavesdropping without protection from MITM, because MITM can be used for eavesdropping (as well as actually inserting malicious traffic into the communication.) Which is why encryption without authentication is pointless (or, worse, illusory security) in most cases. On the internet, your communication is inherently being handed off through a number of intermediaries to an endpoint. If you don't know who the endpoint is, it doesn't do you any good to know that your connection is secure from you to the endpoint.

dendory 13y ago

This is kind of glossing over the point. We all know SSL is good and should be used everywhere. But the simple fact is that to have a fully capable SSL server you need two things: A certificate and a unique IP. There are firms now offering free certificates, but not everyone has the choice to select them. And IP certainly aren't free on most hosts. Sure there are always solutions, like moving to a self hosted model and so on, but it is a significant inconvenience for most.

jackalope 13y ago
SSL/TLS is entirely a server/client exchange that has absolutely nothing to do with IP addresses. If you get the wrong certificate, you have either a crappy client, a crappy server, a misconfigured client, or a misconfigured server. For each case, there is a workaround, and that is where the inconvenience lies.
- al2o3cr 13y ago
  Mostly true now, but not historically true - until SNI [1] was rolled out widely, implementing SSL absolutely required a dedicated IP. Short story shorter, the TLS handshake happens before the Host: header exchange in HTTP; before SNI there wasn't any way for a host that responded to multiple names to identify which cert to use for the handshake. [1] SNI - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication
  - andrewaylett 13y ago
    That's still not quite true -- subject alternative names allow you to put multiple domains on a single certificate. That does raise trust issues if you're doing shared hosting, but it should be fine if you run all of the sites and don't mind them being obviously linked.

zmmmmm 13y ago

Do people trust StartCom? Just curious ... I always wondered why you have all these very expensive cert providers who charge a lot for SSL certs, and then this mysterious company with ties to Israel is handing them out for free? I know it's pure paranoia, but this would seem to be an excellent way to compromise a lot of SSL traffic if you were into that, and the Israelis are pretty famous for all kinds of spying activity that makes PRISM look tame. Just curious what others think about this?

lem72 13y ago
This is my thoughts exactly.... Cue Conspiracy Theory
gsnedders 13y ago
And how do they guarantee identity for zero cost to them? To actually meet all the CA requirements to be a default trusted root isn't easy.
- bigiain 13y ago
  Like all inexpensive ssl certs, the only guarantee of identity is "domain validation" -if you can read mail going to webmaster@, hostmaster@, Postmaster@, or the email address in a Whois lookup for the domain in question, they'll provide you with a signed key for that domain. There are higher levels of validation - "business validation" usually involves faxing someone copies of various government supplied paperwork and receiving phone calls on publicly available phone numbers (which is just "outsourcing the identity guarantee" to yellow pages or Dun and Bradstreet.) "EV" validation ( for "green address bar as well as padlock icon" security requires all that plus spending lots of money.
lwf 13y ago
With StartCom, you just send them a CSR and they sign it. They don't get access to your key. StartCom passed an outside audit and is included in most modern browsers by default, indicating that they at least trust StartCom. They charge for the work they have to do. So, EV and identity validation cost money. Most "domain validated" certs are basically no work, as you can see from the incredibly cheap prices other SSL vendors offer them at.

autoreverse 13y ago

Globe SSL https://globessl.com/ https://globessl.com/ has domain validated certs at $24 per 3 years. I've been using these since 2011 (starting with one year certs before switching to 3 years later) with no problems.

hzlzh 13y ago

Better to do a `SSL client compatibility test` before we choose it. http://www.ssltest.net/compare/runtest.php http://www.ssltest.net/compare/runtest.php

kijin 13y ago

If you don't have a dedicated IP for each domain, and if you need to support clients who can't use SNI (IE on Windows XP, Android 2.x, etc.), here's a simple solution: Use a different port number. https://example-domain.com:12345/ https://example-domain.com:12345/ is a completely different website from https://another-domain-on-same-ip:32412/ https://another-domain-on-same-ip:32412/. No need for a dedicated IP address. No need for wildcard certs, SNI, or any of that fancy stuff. Sure, it's ugly. But it works with every browser (even IE6), and it's not like anybody is actually going to type that into an address bar. You'll be redirecting your HTTP website to your HTTPS website anyway, aren't you? You can only have two of the following three: (1) shared IP, (2) pretty URLs, and (3) legacy client support. Choose which two you want to have.

mike-cardwell 13y ago
A lot of corporate networks only allow machines to connect outwards on a certain whitelisted range of ports, ie 80 and 443. A certificate warning for ancient clients because you're using SNI is a much better failure mode than a connection error.

numberwhun 13y ago

Anyone find and read this yet? http://goo.gl/LWJrAl http://goo.gl/LWJrAl I am a skeptic and just looking at this site makes me question it.

jlgaddis 13y ago

Note that in addition to using it for your web site, you can also use this same certificate for e-mail, assuming you run your own mail server. Long story short: I recently moved my e-mail from Google Apps to a machine under my control. As part of that project, I "redeemed" an unused SSL certificate I had purchased a while back for Postfix and Dovecot. (While I paid for mine, you can use a self-signed one and most MTAs won't complain or refuse to deliver mail, if memory serves.)

Abundnce10 13y ago

And hey, bonus: more complete referrer information in Google Analytics for people visiting from sites already using HTTPS (like Hacker News) If I enable SSL on my website do you think I will be able to get the referring keyword from Google? Now that Google is making all searches secure about 80% of the searches show up as 'Keyword Unavailable'. http://searchengineland.com/post-prism-google-secure-searches-172487 http://searchengineland.com/post-prism-google-secure-searche...

ck2 13y ago

Don't forget to enable ssl stapling which is now available in both nginx and apache and supported in firefox 25 and newest Chrome.

Sami_Lehtinen 13y ago

Because certs are so easy to get, it's better to use fingerprint identification for sites, to make sure it's right one. That's what I've been doing for ages, with https, and smtps. I'll be blogging about it soon.

waaatwaaat 13y ago

Why r u decrypting your private encrypted key? To use for csr request? Can't u do car request with private encrypted key? And why point nginx/apache/watevr at the decrypted private key? Sounds unsecure?

jbarrec 13y ago

Thank you so much for sharing this!!

IgorPartola 13y ago

This is where domain registrars should give you a basic wildcard SSL cert for free when you register the domain. There is no reason why you should get that separately. The first registrar to realize that it is basically free to them to provide you the SSL cert and bundle the two things together wins. I also wonder if advances in DNSSEC will help eliminate various SSL cert dealers: if you have a secure way to prove that example.com translates to a given IP, and DNSSEC could distribute the public cert for HTTPS in some standard manner, then CA's have no reason to exist anymore. See http://blog.huque.com/2012/10/dnssec-and-certificates.html http://blog.huque.com/2012/10/dnssec-and-certificates.html for a decent discussion of this. Edit: even better, if I could provide a secure way for you to communicate with my site over HTTPS without relying on a CA, I could also provide you my public GPG key securely. That way you know that me@example.com really has the certificate with ID DEADBEEF. Of course you don't know that I am Igor Partola is who claims to own igorpartola.com, but at least you can securely associate the email address with the GPG key, which is good enough if you, let's say, only know me as my online identity and only care to communicate with me about things related to that identity. For example, if you found a project of mine on GitHub, and found a huge security flaw in it, you might want to securely email me an exploit and a patch without advertising the vulnerability to the world. It's good enough to have the email/GPG key association without needing to authenticate my real-life identity.

nasalgoat 13y ago

On a side note, which cert provider you go with can dramatically effect your latency times. In testing, we found that DigiCert was 50-100ms faster on queries than our existing GoDaddy certificate, based on the location of their CA hosts. The improved response time resulted in a 15% increase in traffic on our API.

megaframe 13y ago

Been wanting this for a long time but didn't know of a free vendor and didn't seem worth paying for (just for my personal use)... now I got it working on everything but OSX, it just does not seem to want to accept the cert.