Category: Technology

As of last month (March 8th-ish, 2018), Let’s Encrypt supports wildcard certificates! This is great news, because it means that those of us who like using tons of subdomains can now get one cert for all our subdomains, rather than having to get a cert for every single subdomain.

As you may know, Certbot is the tool provided by the EFF that you use to interact with and issue certs from Let’s Encrypt. It used to be called letsencrypt-auto, but when the EFF took it over, it switched names to Certbot.

Now, it’s not quite as easy to get wildcard certs as it is to get normal certs – mainly because there are some prerequisites. The nice thing is, some of these prerequisites make it easier to issue and renew certificates without temporarily disabling your web server.

Prerequisites

The certbot docs aren’t super clear about a lot of this, so you have to do some digging, but essentially it boils down to this:

• Wildcard certificates are only available if you use the ‘DNS’ method of verification.
  
• DNS verification requires that you use a DNS provider with a supported API. This is because you need to be able to quickly create TXT records so that Let’s Encrypt can verify them. You can do this manually, but it seems like a pain. The supported DNS providers for automatic updates are:
  • Cloudflare
  • CloudXNS
  • DigitalOcean
  • dnsimple
  • DNS Made Easy
    
  • Google Cloud DNS
  • Luadns
  • NS1
  • RFC 2136
  • Amazon Route 53

I’ve decided to just go with Google Cloud DNS, because I’m already doing some  other stuff in Google Cloud Platform, and it’s really quite affordable for what I need. Sure, it’s not as cheap as just using the DNS that your registrar provides, but I know mine doesn’t provide an API, especially not one supported by certbot.

Setting up Google Cloud DNS

To get Google Cloud DNS set up, you’ll obviously need a Google account. If you don’t have one, well, I’ll leave it to you to get one. Then you’ll need to set up Google Cloud Platform – once again, I’ll leave that to you. You’ll also need to set up a project for your DNS records. If you already have a project, you can feel free to use that.

Set up a Service Account

Next up, you’ll need to set up a ‘Service Account’ that will let you access the GCP DNS API with restricted permissions, so that you can safely put the credentials on a box that’ll handle your renewals without having to fully authenticate with GCP yourself. To start out, click the ‘hamburger’ menu on the left, then find ‘IAM & admin’, and finally ‘Service Accounts’:

Once there, you’re going to want to click the ‘Create Service Account’ button at the top. Currently, the Cloud DNS permissions and whatnot are in beta, so that means that while you could create a custom role that would have exactly the permissions that you need, those are subject to change and there’s a decent chance that you’d need to recreate your service account later. To avoid this, I just made my new service account into a ‘DNS Administrator’. It’s got more permissions than I strictly need, but I’m not super worried about that.

After you give your service account a name, you’ll want to check the ‘Furnish a new private key’ box so that you can download the credentials file that you’ll need to access the API later:

When you create your account, it should automatically download the JSON file with the credentials. I copied that key to the server I’m using to issue certificates (my good ‘ole Linode server!) so that I can use it later.

Creating your DNS Zone

Naturally, to do anything with DNS, you need to have a domain to do something with. You’ll have to point your registrar to Google/your DNS provider of choice before you can actually issue a wildcard certificate.

I set up my domain in Google Cloud DNS before I switched anything at my domain registrar, so that I wouldn’t have to worry about any downtime where my site was unreachable. To do this, you’ll first want to access the Cloud DNS control panel in GCP:

Next up, click the ‘Create Zone’ button at the top of the console. Then, you’ll enter the information for your domain:

Then you’ll create some records for your domain. At the very least, you’ll probably want one A record pointing to your server, but you can also create subdomains or whatever else you want. If you’re copying your config from somewhere else, put in all the records that you had on your previous provider. I had quite a few records, but even so it didn’t take very long.

Finally, you’ll update the nameservers to point to your DNS provider. I use a few different registrars, but they all make this part pretty easy. In this particular case, I was using Hover – all I had to do was click their ‘Edit Nameservers’ link near the domain I wanted to adjust, and put in Google’s nameserver addresses:

You’ll need to put in whatever your DNS provider wants, but if you’re using Google, the above should work. Once you’ve done that, you might have to wait a few minutes for your DNS to switch over to your new provider. It only took a couple of minutes in my case. I used the DNS lookup tool at MxToolbox to figure out when it switched. It shows your nameserver at the bottom, like this:

Once that’s updated to your new provider, you’re ready to get issuing certificates!

Using Docker to Issue the Certificates

Now, we can do something really nifty here to renew our accounts. Instead of installing certbot-auto on our server, we can just always use the latest up-to-date version in a preconfigured, lightweight Docker container. Sure, this requires you having Docker installed, but who doesn’t these days? If you’d rather, you can do this all manually with your own certbot-auto installation, but I chose to go the Docker route, for simplicity’s sake.

Now it’s actually pretty simple to just run our Docker container. We just need to get the correct arguments, and we’ll be good to go. Note, this does require that you have locations set up where you want to put your certificates, otherwise they’ll just float off into the ether when your container shuts down.

Configuring our Volumes

So first up, let’s create the place we want our certificates to be placed. In my case, I’m going to stick with the default, since my server has already been storing Let’s Encrypt certificates there anyway: /etc/letsencrypt. This is where Let’s Encrypt stores all its configuration and certificates by default. If you’re putting it somewhere else, go ahead and create that directory. Keep note of it for later, naturally. Later, we’re going to map our Docker container to use that as a volume.

Next up, we need to create the place where Let’s Encrypt will store backups. I guess this isn’t strictly necessary (mine is empty anyway), but I figure it can’t hurt. By default it’s in /var/lib/letsencrypt. So we’ll also be mounting that.

Finally, we need to mount the directory where you put your GCP service account’s credentials. I’ve put mine in ~/.secrets/certbot and changed the name to google.json, but you can put it wherever you want and call it whatever you want, really.

So these are going to end up being arguments like this when we run our docker command:

-v "/etc/letsencrypt:/etc/letsencrypt" \
-v "/var/lib/letsencrypt:/var/lib/letsencrypt" \
-v "/home/$(whoami)/.secrets/certbot:/secrets"

Docker & Certbot Arguments

The image that we’re going to be using (assuming you’re sticking with Google DNS) is certbot/dns-google. If you’re using another DNS provider, you can probably figure out pretty easily which image you’ll need.

In the command itself, we’ll also need to use the certonly command, signifying to certbot that we don’t want to have it try to actually install the certificates for us, we only want it to issue them. I personally prefer installing them myself anyway, and that would be very difficult and/or impossible to do from within a Docker container anyway.

We’re also telling certbot to use Google’s DNS with --dns-google, and we’re giving it the path to the credentials file with --dns-google-credentials <file-path>. The last thing we have to do is manually specify the Let’s Encrypt server that we’re using, because right now, wildcard certs are only supported by one server: --server https://acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory. That should do it for our arguments.

All this means that our full docker command will look like this:

sudo docker run -it --name certbot --rm \
    -v "/etc/letsencrypt:/etc/letsencrypt" \
    -v "/var/lib/letsencrypt:/var/lib/letsencrypt" \
    -v "/home/$(whoami)/.secrets/certbot:/secrets" \
    certbot/dns-google \
    --dns-google \
    --dns-google-credentials /secrets/google.json \
    --server https://acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory \
    -d '*.russt.me'

Of course, if you’ve made any adjustments in the way you’re doing this, you’ll need to adjust the command itself. The final line is the important one, -d '*.russt.me, is telling certbot to issue a new wildcard certificate for *.russt.me. You’ll want to make sure you change it, because, well, I’d rather you not issue certificates for my domain. Plus, unless you’ve hacked my Google DNS account, you probably don’t have access.

With any luck, you’ll see some output that looks a lot like this:

Saving debug log to /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log
Plugins selected: Authenticator dns-google, Installer None
Obtaining a new certificate
/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/josepy/jwa.py:107: CryptographyDeprecationWarning: signer and verifier have been deprecated. Please use sign and verify instead.
  signer = key.signer(self.padding, self.hash)
Performing the following challenges:
dns-01 challenge for russt.me
Unsafe permissions on credentials configuration file: /secrets/google.json
Waiting 60 seconds for DNS changes to propagate
Waiting for verification...
Cleaning up challenges

IMPORTANT NOTES:
 - Congratulations! Your certificate and chain have been saved at:
   /etc/letsencrypt/live/russt.me-0001/fullchain.pem
   Your key file has been saved at:
   /etc/letsencrypt/live/russt.me-0001/privkey.pem
   Your cert will expire on <date>. To obtain a new or tweaked
   version of this certificate in the future, simply run certbot
   again. To non-interactively renew *all* of your certificates, run
   "certbot renew"

I’ve cleaned it up a bit, but that’s the gist. I chose to ignore the ‘Unsafe permissions’ warning, since I’m running this in a Docker container anyway and the file on my system actually does have the correct permissions.

Last Thoughts

I’ll leave the configuration and use of these certificates up to you. Hopefully, you have some idea of how to use the certificates on your own server. If not, there are guides all over that should help you out.

I’m extremely thankful to both the EFF and to Let’s Encrypt for enabling us all to issue free SSL certificates, and it’s even better now that they’re letting us issue wildcard certificates. If you’re also feeling thankful, head on over to the EFF’s donation page or Let’s Encrypt’s donation page and drop a donation for them. The web will thank you for it.

If you’ve got any questions or comments, feel free to drop them in the comments below! I’ll do my best to get back to you. Extra props if you correct an error or tell me a better way to do this.

Getting WordPress running properly on Apache with Nginx running as a reverse proxy is surprisingly difficult. It took me quite awhile to get all the moving parts in order, but it’s great once you get it all done. Plus, it’s really cool to get an A+ rating from SSL Labs:

Configuring Nginx for the Switch to HTTPS

Luckily, I figured out the proper configuration to use for Nginx. It took me quite a bit of trial and error, but here’s a sample of the configuration you can use to facilitate your switch:

server {
    listen 80;

    server_name example.com;
    server_tokens off;

    root /usr/share/httpd/example.com;
    index index.php index.html index.htm;

    location / {
        try_files $uri @apache;
    }

    location @apache {
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP  $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8081;
    }

    location ~[^?]*/$ {
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP  $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8081;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP  $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8081;
    }

    location ~/\. {
        deny all;
        access_log off;
        log_not_found off;
    }

    # We'll use this later
    # return 301 https://$server_name$request_uri;
}

server {
    listen 443 ssl;

    server_name example.com;
    server_tokens off;

    root /usr/share/httpd/example.com;
    index index.php index.html index.htm;

    ssl on;
    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem;

    # Ciphers recommended by Mozilla (wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Server_Side_TLS#Recommended_configurations)
    ssl_ciphers 'ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:ECDHE-RSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256';
    ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;
    ssl_dhparam /usr/share/nginx/dhparams.pem;

    location / {
        try_files $uri @apache;
    }

    location @apache {
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP  $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8081;
    }

    location ~[^?]*/$ {
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP  $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8081;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP  $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8081;
    }

    location ~/\. {
        deny all;
        access_log off;
        log_not_found off;
    }
}

Now for some explanation of what’s going on in that configuration file. First, we catch any unsecured traffic – that’s the directive that says listen 80. This part is just a temporary provision to allow us to accept both HTTP and HTTPS traffic while we’re getting things set up. Later on, we’ll adjust the config to redirect all the HTTP traffic to HTTPS, forcing secured connections. For now, though, you’ll notice that the first server block for http and the second server block for https contain large blocks that are identical – that’s because for now they do pretty much the same thing – just one with encryption and one without.

In our second server block, we actually configure the stuff that matters. First, we enable ssl and tell nginx where to find the TLS certificates. Next, we configure the ciphers that we’ll allow on this site. These specific ciphers are recommended by Mozilla for ‘modern’ compatibility. If you need to support older stuff, you’ll have to investigate allowing less secure ciphers.

After that, we have several location blocks that tell nginx what to do with different requests. The first and second rules tell nginx to check for a matching file (that’s the try_files). If it finds a file, like an image, CSS, JS, etc., nginx will serve that file directly. If there isn’t a matching file, it passes it to @apache, which is defined in the next rule. Nginx is faster at serving raw files than Apache, so we want it serving files where possible.

The next two location rules tell nginx to pass any requests for .php files or requests ending in / to apache, as well. We pass these to apache because it’s faster at handling php requests. In these cases, I’ve got Apache running locally on port 8081. We need to forward the headers and request host to Apache to make sure that Apache still knows what to do to handle the requests properly.

Finally, the last location rule tells nginx to deny access to any files beginning in ., which are hidden files that really shouldn’t be shown to the public.

With a quick restart of nginx, your new configuration should take effect.

Configuring Apache

Luckily, as far as configuration goes, nginx does most of the heavy lifting. It only forwards the appropriate requests to Apache, so our Apache configuration is pretty straightforward. Of course, the most important thing that you need to do is tell Apache to listen on a different port than nginx. By default, both nginx and Apache listen on port 80. I decided to tell Apache to listen on port 8081 by specifying that in my httpd.conf file – by changing the Listen line to Listen 8081.

To configure my site, I simply used the following:

<VirtualHost *:8081>
    ServerName example.com

    DocumentRoot /usr/share/httpd/example.com

    <Directory />
        Options FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride None
    </Directory>

    <Directory /usr/share/httpd/example.com>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
        AllowOverride All
        Order allow,deny
        allow from all
        Require all granted
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

It’s a pretty simple configuration – just telling Apache what to listen to and where to find the applicable files. And that does it for our web server configuration! Finally, we just need to tell WordPress that it needs to just use https.

Configuring WordPress

You see, the primary difficulty with the WordPress portion of things lies in the fact that WordPress normally assumes it’s running on Apache, with no proxy set up.

Now, if you set up a redirect from http to https for your site before you set your site URL to https, your site wouldn’t be able to load any of your assets (unless you enable mixed-content). It makes your site look awesome:

What’s better is that if you tried to access your control panel, you would end up stuck in a redirect loop, endlessly going from HTTP to HTTPS and back. It results in your browser showing something like this:

But since you’ve got your web servers configured to temporarily allow http, this is a pretty easy fix. First, log in to your control panel. There, you’re going to need to access ‘Settings ▶ General’. Finally, update both your ‘WordPress Address’ and ‘Site Address’ to use https instead of http.

Next, we need to configure a couple of settings in our WordPress installation’s config.php file. These are pretty simple, and the process is outlined in the WordPress documentation. We need to add the following lines to config:

define('FORCE_SSL_ADMIN', true);
if (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO'], 'https') !== false)
    $_SERVER['HTTPS']='on';

These lines tell WordPress that we want to use the control panel over HTTPS. If we leave these out, we end up in the endless redirect loop I mentioned up above. Now, you’re ready to force all your traffic to use HTTPS.

Force Encryption

Finally, we’ve got to make the final adjustment to our config, that will force all traffic over HTTPS. It’s really straightforward – just change the first server block in your nginx config file to something like this:

server {
    listen 80;

    server_name example.com;
    server_tokens off;

    return 301 https://$server_name$request_uri;
}

All this does is return a 301 Status Code, telling users’ browsers that an address has moved permanently – all major browsers will automatically redirect them to the exact same address, but using https instead. It’s a simple way to force traffic to use https.

With one final restart of nginx, you’re good to go! All your wordpress traffic will be set up to use https.

I’ve recently been thinking about Wireless Security, and the way it relates to ‘public access points’. It seems to me that it’s very difficult for us to avoid public networks altogether (whether we’re at a hotel, a coffee shop, or really anywhere else). Sometimes, we really need to connect, even if we have some burning desire to avoid all public networks.

I’ve seen all sorts of recommendations on how to ‘solve’ this, usually involving ‘securing’ the network with encryption. This sounds good, since some encryption is better than none, right? Even if you make the password public, by writing it on the wall or putting it in the network’s name, you’re still ‘securing’ the network, right?

Unfortunately, even for ‘secure’ Wi-Fi, we’re most often still using what’s called a PSK (a Pre-Shared Key). The problem is, it’s just that – it’s a key that everyone using the network shares. That means that the guy in the corner on the same network, even though you’re both using ‘secure’ Wi-Fi, can still decrypt everything you send. PSK’s provide no additional security over an open network, except that the attacker at least has to know that key.

The only exception to this is WPA-Enterprise, which is normally used as just that, an enterprise connection. It requires quite a bit of setup, and it’s far too painful for most of us to mess with. Not only that, but it really makes it difficult to have an ‘open’ network.

So, with all that said, what can we actually do to be secure on public Wi-Fi? Truthfully, the best thing we can actually do right now is use HTTPS everywhere. While it’s been trivial to create a secure connection between two individuals for quite some time, the difficulty lies in verifying that the person/system that you’re connecting to is in fact who they say they are, and not some Man in the Middle.

With HTTPS, this is handled through the creation and verification of SSL certificates by Certificate Authorities, who verify the ownership of certain keys, so that you can be sure that when you go to https://google.com, you’re actually communicating with Google, not someone else.

But with wireless networks, this would be much harder. Short of requiring every public network owner to submit themselves to some method of verification that was then publicly shared with everyone, it’s actually impossible to do so.

Truthfully, I wish I had something better to say. But unfortunately, the best course of action for public networks is to get every website to use HTTPS – even though it doesn’t protect everything, it’s the best we’ve got. So get out there and get your certificates!

Of course, you can always use a VPN, which will give you better security, at the expense of some speed and whatever subscription cost you have.