I decided to upgrade my site to the new version of Ubuntu as I haven’t done that for a couple of years. It is always a nice thing to work on when I am on vacation as it is the sort of thing that I don’t really get around to normally when I am busy. What a pain that ended up being.

The Upgrade for the OS itself went very smoothly as it seems to normally do so for Ubuntu. But the upgrade to the newer version of PHP broke everything with my site. As I think back actually I think this happened last time when I went from Ubuntu 14.04 to 16.04 as well and it jumped from php5 to php7. I ended up with about a 3 hour outage trying to sort everything out.

Recently Let’s Encrypt announced that they would be supporting wildcard certs. I was pretty excited to hear about this as many times I would like to get certs for machines that might not be accessible on the internet. Currently I didn’t see an easy way to do this. With the new certs you could get a cert on your web server for your domain and use that cert on all the other machines in your domain that need TLS as well.

Recently I ported my domain hosting from Godaddy to Google Domains. My main reason for doing so was to save money. Domain names on Godaddy cost $3 more per year, plus they charge you for privacy on whois searches whereas Google includes that for free. It was a fairly easy process to transfer my domain names in, but configuring the DNS was a little bit weird as their zone file editing interface was different that godaddy’s. However I thought I had it all good and working so I was happy with my setup.

Recently one of my friends was working on a Spring Boot project and he was having trouble finding an example of how to configure user login for his site with Spring Boot using JPA. I had mentioned that there is some mention of configuring security in Greg Turnquist’s book Learning Spring Boot. He had just purchased Spring Boot in Action and I don’t think he was rushing to grab another book, but he hadn’t been able to find a good online tutorial.

I received an email a week or 2 ago that I was accepted into the EFF’s Let’s Encrypt Beta program to try out their new SSL certificate generation service. It uses the Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) protocol. I have been really interested in this program since it was announced as in the past when I have used Start SSL’s certificate system I found their whole validation system to be a little clunky. The idea of a nice automated program that does all the work for me sounded very appealing.

I saw a post on twitter about Security Headers. Basically Security Headers will scan your website and check for some common HTTP Headers that you should be including to make your site more secure. They also include helpful links as to how to fix the issues it finds. On my first scanned it warned me of the following: MISSING Content-Security-Policy, MISSING X-Frame-Options, MISSING X-Xss-Protection, MISSING X-Content-Type-Options, MISSING Public-Key-Pins, and X-Powered-By. After going through their documentation I added all of those headers except for Public Key Pins. I am not 100% on that, my concern is when your certificate expires and you replace it (which on a free certificate happens every year) do you end up with people getting an error on your website for the next week cause they have an old key pinned? Not sure enough about that to actually enable it, which is why I hadn’t previously enabled it. The other headers though I didn’t realize could be an issue so I promptly corrected them. The one thing I couldn’t easily fix was the Server header as apparently that is compiled into NGINX and I wasn’t feeling like compiling my own from source. I was able to remove the version string though. All in all they give some very easy configuration changes you can make to help prevent attacks against your website and I strongly recommend giving their tool a look.

So a little while back when I had been playing with Pagespeed I somehow managed to break certificate stapling on my server. So when I ran the Qualys SSL Server Test my score had fallen to a B! I messed around and tried a few things and I had no luck getting it to work. One of my friends said the site started to give weird errors under Chrome on Android. Then I was reading this CertSimple Blog entry yesterday and they mentioned the Mozilla Server Side TLS Project, which I don’t think I had heard of. Basically what it does is you enter your server version and your OpenSSL version and how aggressive you want your security settings and it will generate a sample config for you. It will tell you based on how aggressive your settings are what the minimum browser versions are. For example of of the differences between Intermediate and Modern is that they drop support for TLSv1 in Modern and only support TLSv1.1 and TLSv1.2. For most browsers this doesn’t seem to be an issue but if you are running IE that means the minimum browser version is IE 11. I debated whether I should drop TLSv1 support or not, but I figure if I keep it I can support IE back to 7, though I can’t imagine any software engineers that might check out this blog using IE anyway. For now I have kept it but one of these days I will drop it because given the rate of SSL issues with Freak and Logjam lately, it is only a matter of time before someone finds a hole in TLSv1.

The Electronic Freedom Foundation has released a nice post on how one should configure their server to pass the Qualsys SSL Labs test with an A+. Given that when I initially setup my site it took me like 3 hours of messing around to get my site to pass with an A+ I figured I should share this post with everyone as it is so useful. Check it out here!

I was checking the Spring Blog today to see what was new after taking much of the week off. I came upon the following entry. Of course I was very interested as Spring Security 4.0 has been hyped for a few months now so I figured I would check out the migration guide from 3.2 to see what will be involved for us to upgrade. I found this is the new feature section. They have added a feature which will now automatically prepend ROLE_ to any roles you use in Spring security if your role doesn’t start with that. So if you have a role called ROLE_USER for a standard user you can now just say @PreAuthorize(“hasRole(‘USER’)”).

I just wanted to mention signal has been released so for all the iPhone users out there it is definitely worth installing. Signal is an implementation of Text Secure on IOS. Given the insecurity of text messages and how many other messengers have varying degrees of security Open WhisperSystems has released Signal. Some popular chat programs like WhatsApp are starting to encrypt but they aren’t always encrypted. One of the biggest benefits of Signal is they released the source code so that anyone can audit the code. Granted if you are installing it from the iTunes store there is still the risk of a back door being in there, but one inclined and with a developers license could build their own and install it on their phone. Of course that also assumes that your copy of XCode hasn’t been tampered with. At the end of the day if you are a target they are probably going to get your stuff, but the benefits of widespread use of secure products would be to disallow wholesale metadata and data collection that has been alleged to have been happening so that innocent people are left alone. The EFF has a nice scorecard that ranks the security aspects of different messenger apps. Here is another story suggesting the use of this app. If you are on Android Signal is an implementation of TextSecure.