What web developers should know about SSL

A less common question we get, that a lot of web devs are interested in is &#x27;How do I mitigate against MITM attacks&#x27;.<p>- As a browser, by using a default OS and watching the root CA store. You can control the key stores on most devices except iOS pretty easily: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;certsimple.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;control-the-ssl-cas-your-browser-trusts" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;certsimple.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;control-the-ssl-cas-your-browser...</a><p>- As a server, setting up key pinning (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;HTTP_Public_Key_Pinning" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;HTTP_Public_Key_Pinning</a>) which throws up a browser warning if someone accesses your site with a new key.

Right from the beginning &quot;EV cert&quot;. What is EV? When you write article and it&#x27;s the first time you use acronym, please define it.

A slightly stronger argument not to use 4096-bit certs is that just about every (intermediate) CA certificate out there is 2048-bit, and there&#x27;s no security advantage to your cert being 4096-bit if it only has a 2048-bit signature. An attacker can just factor your CA&#x27;s public key and not care how strong your own public key is.<p>So it&#x27;s not just that it slows down your site, it slows down your site without any additional security or other benefit.

Item number 1: SSL is obsolete, use TLS.<p>Can we please, as a society, try to move forward with the correct acronym? Everyone who isn&#x27;t wide-open-vulnerable is using TLS 1.0 or newer. (Personally, I like to run TLS 1.2 only, but my CloudFlare domains still speak 1.0 and I can&#x27;t turn it off without paying money.)

The general public couldn&#x27;t care less about EV certs.<p>Important reading: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;webmasters.stackexchange.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;9095" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;webmasters.stackexchange.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;9095</a>

Another thing: You should probably go TLS-only. Set up a 301 redirect from HTTP to HTTPS, and set the Strict-Transport-Security header on all HTTPS responses.<p>It&#x27;s very easy to do, and ensures all your users get maximal security. The future is encrypted.<p>Today I did this for my blog: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;TazeTSchnitzel&#x2F;blog&#x2F;commit&#x2F;792986d18d8583712fa3fe59d0ec047b21701d46" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;TazeTSchnitzel&#x2F;blog&#x2F;commit&#x2F;792986d18d8583...</a>

Re: Point 1<p>You really only need two ciphers to get to most browsers&#x2F;clients and good security and speed (replace RSA with ECDSA if needed):<p>TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256<p>TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA<p>Example: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ssllabs.com&#x2F;ssltest&#x2F;analyze.html?d=theandrewbailey.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ssllabs.com&#x2F;ssltest&#x2F;analyze.html?d=theandrewbail...</a><p>It baffles me that Mozilla recommends 20 ciphers for their highest security level. I think high security should be more exclusive than that, and with forward secrecy only.<p>Point 5:<p>How I imported Let&#x27;s Encrypt&#x27;s certificates into a Java keystore:<p><pre><code> openssl pkcs12 -export -name yourdomain -in fullchain.pem -inkey privkey.pem -out pubchainpriv.p12 keytool -importkeystore -srcstoretype pkcs12 -srckeystore pubchainpriv.p12 -alias yourdomain -destkeystore &#x2F;path&#x2F;to&#x2F;keystore.jks</code></pre>

I&#x27;ve compiled lots of resources for moving to HTTPS: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.google.com&#x2F;document&#x2F;d&#x2F;1EJKAoa4Hxc4AyH0znuA_AAplcNeNejEhATFptFX-OME&#x2F;edit" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.google.com&#x2F;document&#x2F;d&#x2F;1EJKAoa4Hxc4AyH0znuA_AApl...</a>

A good start. If you want to improve it, please add information about how to consume HTTPS services in a secure way.<p>Also potentially add an aside for self-signed&#x2F;enterprise CA, as most web developers will encounter internal systems sooner or later. This makes the above (consuming services) more challenging :-)

My addition: if you use SNI cert, expect loads of problems. And I don&#x27;t mean browser support.<p>Bing wont crawl you, you have to email the support and maybe they manually whitelist you.<p>A lot of RSS readers wont work, services like pocket, reddit submissions, mailchimp rss to email etc etc.<p>It&#x27;s crazy considering we want to move everything to https only.

You might be slow from traffic, but just in case that&#x27;s not the case, the linked article loads fine but the home page does not on a 2nd gen Nexus 7.<p>I see the top navigation followed by a white page, no scrollbar.

beware of item 4. Android 2.3 is still prevalent in some markets

What should I know about cert revocation and client support for it?