A Note on SSL Certificate

This is a note about the Linkedin learning course SSL Certificates for Web Developers.

Certificate and protocol

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What are SSL/TLS stands for?

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They stands for Secure Socket Layer and Transport Layer Security. They are the protocol names.

What is HTTPS, and why we are using it?

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Https[ecure], a protocol on top of HTTP to secure the integrity of the data sending form the user to server.

What is a certificate, and what is it for?

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A certificate ¹ (.crt, .cer) certifies the ownership of a public key. A certificate contains:

• organization,
• issuer (e.g. the Certificate Authority / Self-signed),
• valid period,
• url,
• state / country

These information can be used to identify the certificate owner.

The public key is used to encrypt/decrypt the communication between computers.

Cryptography

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Asymmetric VS. Symmetric

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Asymmetric cryptography requies a pair of keys. The Public key is used to encrypt messages while the private key is for decryption.

In symmetric cryptography, both ends use the same password to encrypt + decrypt messages.

Why are we using both technologies? And how?

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In short: For the balance of security and speed, we use asymmetric cryptography to establish secure connection (handshake) and use symmetric cryptography for the data transmission.

The Handshake

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The end user and the server use the same password to encrypt + decrypt the messages. This password is sent from a server to a user by following steps:

• Validate the certificate…
  1. User makes a request to a web server.
  2. Web server responds with its public key certificate.
  3. User checks if the public key certificate is valid.
• If the certificate from web server is valid…
  1. User encrypts the password using server’s public key, and send to web server.
  2. Server decrypts with its private key.

After that, a secure connection is established and they shared the same password ².

Types of certificate

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Self-signed

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• Intra-communications between systems under same organization.
• Local development

CA

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• Subdomain: tied to 1 domain (e.g. www.mydoma.in)
• Wildcard: tied to a groups of subdomains (e.g. *.mydoma.in)
• Multi-domain: (e.g. mydoma.in, myweb.site, …)

ACME (Automatic Certificate Management Environment)

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To configuring Let’s Encrypt’s ACME on server, we can make use of the CertBot. For IIS, use Certify.

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HSTS

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This can instruct the browser to interact with the server with HTTPS only. Redirect from HTTP to HTTPS is not required. This is achieved by adding a response header (Strict-Transport-Security).

Example response header:

Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=63072000; includeSubDomains; preload

What HSTS is protecting us from?

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The Man-in-the-Middle TLS Protocol Downgrade Attack.³ In this example, the hacker C sends a ARP cache table request to both the client A and server B:

Now the traffic from A to B is going through C, a typical Man-in-the-Middle attack.

The next step is C try to have a downgrade on the TLS version. Since the browsers are backward-compatible on older TLS versions, C can therefore to make the version downgraded to the negotiated version in the handshake process. C can then intercept and decrypt the messages by making use of the security vulnerabilities of eariler TLS.

HSTS Preloading

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Avoid redirection of the first request too: https://hstspreload.org/