Posts

HTTP Strict Transport Security

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I’m excited for this post, because I get to introduce one of my best friends (and favorite coworkers) to the tutorialinux horde. I’ve been working with Christian in some form or another for several years now. We met while working at a startup in 2012, where he is the lead developer, and have worked on several projects since then. Although right now he gets paid mostly for programming work, he’s a longtime sysadmin and has been a huge influence on my growing taste for using FreeBSD systems in production.

You know those people who seem to have started in IT when they were still in diapers? That’s Christian. It’s my pleasure to welcome him as a contributor to tutorialinux. He’s got some fantastic stuff to share, and a huge amount of real-world experience to back up everything he teaches.

Lately, Christian and I have become a bit obsessed with encryption and HTTPS (going to far as to write a mini e-book about it, teaching people to set up TLS on their websites). Can you blame us? With the recent Internet security scares and the enormous push for TLS by organizations like Firefox, Tor, Google, Let’s Encrypt, and others, it’s definitely at the forefront of many system administrators’ and developers’ minds.

In these conversations about website security and HTTPS, you’ll often hear people talk about HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS for short). But what exactly is HTTP Strict Transport Security? How does it work? And how can you set it up in a few simple steps?

You’re about to find out.

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Protecting Your Website With HTTPS (SSL/TLS)

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I’ve just released the first tutorialinux ebook. For those of you who want a sneak-peek, this post is basically a command-line-instructions only version of the practical content from the e-book. These instructions will get you a working configuration for serving HTTPS traffic to your website visitors.

Disclaimer: This post leaves out most of the background, theory, explanations, security and performance tuning, and additional considerations like backups, security, etc. All of this extra content is found in the e-book. If you want to support tutorialinux, buying the e-book is a great way to ensure that there’s a constant stream of new content coming out on YouTube and this website.

Okay, that being said, let’s get started!

If you’re a sysadmin, chances are that you feel strongly about the adoption of widespread encryption. Advertising companies, governments, and criminals are trying to track and record every move you and your website visitors make, every interest you show, and every thought you hint at. People are finally beginning to fight back by encrypting web traffic, even for pages that don’t absolutely require it, such as login or payment pages.

In this post, I’ll show you how.

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