If you are using GCP HTTPS LB to deliver your public services, be sure to apply an explicit SSL Policy that controls how TLS is negotiated with clients. Setting a SSL policy allows you to control minimum version of TLS as well as available cipher families. A basic SSL policy that limits clients to … GCP: enabling SSL policies on HTTPS LB Ingress
The JRE comes preloaded with a set of trusted root authorities, but if you are working with self-signed certificates, or SAN server certificates that were signed using your own Certificate Authority then you are going to need to add these certificates to your trusted keystore. If your Java application attempts to communicate via TLS to … Java: Loading self-signed, CA, and SAN certificates into a Java Keystore
It is common in secure production datacenters for internal hosts to be forced to go through a reverse proxy for public internet access. The same concept can be applied to apt package management, where setting up a centralized package proxy enables caching as well as security controls. In a datacenter where you could have hundreds … Ubuntu: A centralized apt package cache using Apt-Cacher-NG
SMTP mail relays exposed to the internet typically use a combination of SSL and authenticated SMTP to avoid abuse by malicious actors. This is an excellent choice from a security perspective, but makes smoke testing a bit more complex than just opening telnet.
HAProxy is a high performance TCP/HTTP (Level 4 and Level 7) load balancer and reverse proxy. A common pattern is allowing HAProxy to be the fronting SSL-termination point, and then HAProxy determines which pooled backend server serves the request.
Nginx is a popular reverse proxy and load balancer that focuses on level 7 (application) traffic. A common pattern is allowing Nginx to be the fronting SSL-termination point, and then Nginx determines which pooled backend server is best available to serve the request.
Update Feb 2023: enumerating the secure protocols and ciphers of a remote site can be done more efficiently by nmap, as described in my other article here. While enabling HTTPS is a important step in securing your web application, it is critical that you take steps to disable legacy protocols and low strength ciphers that … OpenSSL: Using OpenSSL to enumerate protocols and ciphers in use by web applications