sporticia

For the final part of reminding myself how to secure a linux website, I need to include the bit on how to force unsecure traffic to be secure. This is done using rewrite rules to rewrite the url path from http:// to https:// you can make the whole site redirect to secure, or just certain subsections of the site.

To force the whole site secure, you first need to run x2 versions of the site, a secure version listening on port 443 and a non-secure version listening on port 80. You then need a rewrite rule on the port 80 site that basically say if this url is http:// rewrite the url to be https://

The config to do this is below and needs to be included between your <VirtualHost> tags on the non-secure site config

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !443
RewriteRule (.*) https://www.sporticia.com/ [R]

This basically says if the url is not on port 443 then rewrite the url to be https://blah

As the re-write rules are written using regular expressions, you can actually do some pretty complex stuff, examplex of which you can find here and also here

So we now have our private key .key and our public key .crt (or something to that effect).

Now we need include the files in the apache config. place the .key and .crt files where you can find them (I use /etc/apache/ssl-certs/). now you need to edit your apache config file. I’ve included a dummy version below to show you what to add and where.

You will need to add ‘SSLRequieSSL’ in between the <Directory> </Directory> tags to tell apache that the content from this directory should be encrypted, you will also need to alter the port from :80 to :443

You then need to include

SSLEngine on
SSLOptions +StrictRequire
SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache/ssl-certs/www.sporticia.com.crt
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/apache/ssl-certs/www.sporticia.com.key
SetEnvIf User-Agent “.*MSIE.*” nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown

to provide the location details for the private key and the certificate to be used.

The whole thing should look something like this

<VirtualHost 192.168.1.10:443>
ServerName www.sporticia.com
ServerAlias sporticia.com
ServerAdmin test@sporticia.com

</VirtualHost>

Restart Apache (using either ‘apachectl restart’ or ‘/etc/init.d/apache restart’) and you should now be able to browse the site using ‘https://sitename’ and you should have the little padlock icon to indicate the site is secured with an SSL certificate.

Note that while this will permit you to browse the site using https, it will not force the browser to https, if anyone tries to access the site using http they will get a 403 forbidden page.

Next post will show how to force the broswer to use the secure version of the site

Grrrrrr, some of our SSL certificates had expired on a linux server today. And, like very time I have to renew an SSL on a linux machine, there was a bit of trial and error as I tried to remember how I did it the last time.

So here’s a refresher for me and notes for anyone doing this for the first time.

SSL uses x2 keys for encryption and decryption. you create the private key on your linux server, and then use this to create a certificate signing request (csr). you then use the csr with a 3rd party certificate authority to create your certificate or public key.

the math involved is pretty heavy but this guy explains it really well using a tiny prime number so you can follow (hopefully).

First, generate your private key on the server using

openssl genrsa -out <sitename>.key 2048

replace <sitename> with the name of your site, this will help you to tell different keys apart. The 2048 at the end says how many bits in size you want the key to be, no smaller than 2048.

Next, we use the private key to create the certificate signing request (csr)

openssl req -new -key <sitename>.key -out <sitename>.csr

openssl will ask you some questions about the csr, important notes:

The country code is ‘GB’ for the United Kingdom, not ‘UK’ !!!!

Remember the password you use when you create the csr, you will need it to install the certificate you create from the csr

BACKUP YOUR .key and .crt files ! if you loose them, you will have to start all over again

You can now take your .csr file along to a 3rd party certificate authority (Thwate, Go Daddy, VeriSign etc. etc.) and use it to generate your private key (.crt or certificate file).

Next post will explain how to use the keys with apache to secure the site.