How to configure your HTTPS server

Saturday, January 19. 2013, 11:45
Yesterday, we had a meeting at CAcert Berlin where I had a little talk about how to almost-perfectly configure your HTTPS server. Motivation for that was the very nice Qualys SSL Server test, which can remote-check your SSL configuration and tell you a bunch of things about it.

While playing with that, I created a test setup which passes with 100 points in the Qualys test. However, you will hardly be able to access that page, which is mainly due to it's exclusive support for TLS 1.2. All major browsers fail. Someone from the audience told me that the iPhone browser was successfully able to access the page. To safe the reputation of free software, someone else found out that the Midori browser is also capable of accessing it. I've described what I did there on the page itself and you may also read it here via http.

Here are my slides "SSL, X.509, HTTPS - How to configure your HTTPS server" as ODP, as PDF and on Slideshare.

And some links mentioned in the slides:
Check SSL and SSH weak keys due to broken random numbers
EFF SSL Observatory
Sovereign Keys proect

Some great talks on the mentioned topics by others:
Facthacks Talk 29c3
MD5 considered harmful today - Creating a rogue CA Certificate
Is the SSLiverse a safe place?

Update: As people seem to find these browser issue interesting: It's been pointed out that the iPad Browser also works. Opera with TLS 1.2 enabled seems to work for some people, but not for me (maybe Windows-only). luakit and epiphany also work, but they don't check certificates at all, so that kind of doesn't count.

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luakit manages it as well. Probably every mini-browser based on webkit-gtk does.
#1 krigstask (Link) on 2013-01-19 12:43
It's basically not the webkit part, but openssl. If a browser uses "plain" openssl without doing anything further and if openssl is on version 1.0.1, it should "just work". Simple textmode browsers like w3m and lynx also do it.
#1.1 Hanno (Link) on 2013-01-19 13:11
I can read the fancyssl page with Opera 12.12 after manually enabling TLS 1.2.
#2 Albert on 2013-01-21 17:06
Safari on iPAD can display your testing-page.
#3 Oliver on 2013-01-27 00:14
Works in Konqueror (KDE 4.9 version). The SSL info window shows TLS 1.2 being used, but the Encryption field is blank.
#4 anon on 2013-02-10 23:00

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