Given the amount of personal data that flows through the great series of tubes that is the internet, encryption isn't something that we can or should lightly ignore. Modern browsers offer several mechanisms you can use to ensure that your users' data is secure while in transit: secure cookies and Strict Transport Security are two of the most important. They allow you to seamlessly protect your users, upgrading their connections to HTTPS, and providing a guarantee that user data is never sent in the clear.
Why should you care? Consider this:
Delivering a web page over an unencrypted HTTP connection is more or less the same as handing an unsealed envelope to the first person you see on the street who looks like she's walking in the direction of the post office. If you're lucky, she might take it all the way there herself, or she might hand it off to the next person she sees who's headed the right way. That person might do the same, and so on.
Most strangers in this impromptu chain are trustworthy, and would never peek at your open letter or alter it. The more times the letter changes hands, however, the greater the number of people with complete access to the letter you're sending. In the end, it's quite likely that your letter's intended recipient will get something in the mail, but whether that something is the same something that you handed off in the first place is an open question. Maybe you should have sealed that envelope…
Middlemen
For better or worse, huge swaths of the internet rely on the trustworthiness of strangers. Servers aren't directly connected to each other, but pass requests and responses along from router to router in an enormous game of Telephone.
You can see these hops in action with traceroute. The route from my computer to HTML5Rocks looks something like this:
$ traceroute html5rocks.com
traceroute to html5rocks.com (173.194.71.102), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 router1-lon.linode.com (212.111.33.229) 0.453 ms
2 212.111.33.233 (212.111.33.233) 1.067 ms
3 217.20.44.194 (217.20.44.194) 0.704 ms
4 google1.lonap.net (193.203.5.136) 0.804 ms
5 209.85.255.76 (209.85.255.76) 0.925 ms
6 209.85.253.94 (209.85.253.94) 1.226 ms
7 209.85.240.28 (209.85.240.28) 48.714 ms
8 216.239.47.12 (216.239.47.12) 22.575 ms
9 209.85.241.193 (209.85.241.193) 36.033 ms
10 72.14.233.180 (72.14.233.180) 43.222 ms
11 72.14.233.170 (72.14.233.170) 43.242 ms
12 *
13 lb-in-f102.1e100.net (173.194.71.102) 44.523 ms
13 hops isn't bad, really. However, if I'm sending requests via HTTP, then each of those intermediate routers has complete access to my requests and to the servers' responses. All the data is being transferred as unencrypted plaintext, and any of those intermediaries could act as a Man in the Middle, reading through my data, or even manipulating it in transit.
Worse, this sort of interception is virtually undetectable. A maliciously modified HTTP response looks exactly like a valid response, as no mechanism exists that would enable you to ensure that the data received is _exactly _the data sent. If someone decides to turn my Internet upside-down for laughs, then I'm more or less out of luck.
Is this a secure line?
Switching from plaintext HTTP to a secured HTTPS connection offers your best defense against middlemen. HTTPS connections encrypt the entire channel end-to-end before any data is sent, making it impossible for machines between you and your destination to read or modify data in transit.
The security HTTPS provides is rooted in the concept of public and private cryptographic keys. A deep discussion of the details is (happily) well beyond the scope of this article, but the core premise is fairly straightforward: data encrypted with a given public key can only be decrypted with the corresponding private key. When a browser kicks off an HTTPS handshake to create a secure channel, the server provides a certificate which gives the browser all the information necessary in order to verify its identity by checking that the server is in possession of the proper private key. All communication from that point forward is encrypted in such a way that proves that requests are delivered to and responses received from the authenticated server.
HTTPS, therefore, gives you some assurance that you're talking to the server you think you're talking to, and that no one else is listening in or twiddling bits on the wire. This kind of encryption is an absolute prerequisite for security on the web; if your application isn't currently delivered over HTTPS, it's vulnerable to attack. Fix it. Ars Technica has a great guide to obtaining and installing a certificate (for free) that I'd recommend you take a look at for technical details. Configuration will differ from provider to provider and server to server, but the certificate request process is the same everywhere.
Secure by default
Once you've requested and installed a certificate, make sure your users benefit from your hard work: migrate your existing users to HTTPS connections transparently via the magic of HTTP redirection, and ensure that cookies are only delivered over secure connections.
This way, please
When a user visits http://example.com/, redirect them to
https://example.com/ by sending a 301 Moved
Permanently response with an appropriate Location header:
$ curl -I http://mkw.st/
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: nginx/1.3.7
...
Keep-Alive: timeout=20
Location: https://mkw.st/
You can set up this sort of redirection easily in servers like Apache or Nginx.
For example, an Nginx configuration that redirects from http://example.com/
to https://example.com/ looks like this:
server {
listen [YOUR IP ADDRESS HERE]:80;
server_name example.com www.example.com;
location "/" {
rewrite ^(.*) https://www.example.com$1 permanent;
}
}
Lock the cookie jar
Cookies give us the ability to provide users with seamless logged-in experiences over the stateless HTTP protocol. Data stored in cookies, including sensitive information like session IDs, is sent along with every request, allowing the server to make sense of which user it's responding to at the moment. Once we've ensured that users are hitting our site over HTTPS, we should also ensure that the sensitive data stored in cookies is only ever transferred over a secure connection, and never sent in the clear.
Setting a cookie generally involves an HTTP header that looks something like this:
set-Cookie: KEY=VALUE; path=/; expires=Sat, 01-Jan-2022 00:00:00 GMT
You can instruct the browser to restrict the cookie's use to secure sessions by tacking on a single keyword:
Set-Cookie: KEY=VALUE; path=/; expires=Sat, 01-Jan-2022 00:00:00 GMT; secure
Cookies set with the secure keyword won't be sent over HTTP, ever.
Closing the open window
Transparent redirection to HTTPS means that the vast majority of the time your users are on your site, they'll be using a secure connection. It does, however, leave a small window of opportunity for attack: the initial HTTP connection is wide open, vulnerable to SSL stripping and related attacks. Given that a man in the middle has complete access to the initial HTTP request, it can act as a proxy between you and the server, keeping you on an insecure HTTP connection regardless of the server's intentions.
You can mitigate the risk of this class of attack by asking the browser to
enforce HTTP Strict Transport Security
(HSTS). Sending the
Strict-Transport-Security HTTP header instructs the browser to do the HTTP to
HTTPS redirection client-side, without ever touching the network (this also
happens to be great for performance; the best request is the one you don't have
to make):
$ curl -I https://mkw.st/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.3.7
...
Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=2592000
Browsers that support this header (currently Firefox, Chrome, and Opera: caniuse has details) will make a note that this particular site has requested HTTPS-only access, meaning that regardless of how a user comes to the site, she'll be visiting over HTTPS. Even if she types http://example.com/ into the browser, she'll end up on HTTPS without ever making an HTTP connection. Better yet, if the browser detects an invalid certificate (potentially trying to spoof your server's identity), users won't be allowed to continue on via HTTP; it's all or nothing, which is excellent.
The browser will expire the server's HSTS status after max-age seconds
(about a month in this example); set this to something reasonably high.
You can also ensure that all of an origin's subdomains are protected by adding
the includeSubDomains directive to the header:
$ curl -I https://mkw.st/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.3.7
...
Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=2592000
Go forth, securely
HTTPS the only way to be even remotely sure that data you send reaches the
intended recipient intact. You should set up secure connections for your sites
and applications, today. It's a fairly straightforward process, and will help
keep your customers' data safe. Once you've gotten an encrypted channel in
place, you should transparently redirect users to this secure connection
regardless of how they come to your site by sending a 301 HTTP response. Then
make sure that that all your users' sensitive session information uses only
that secure connection by adding the secure keyword when setting cookies.
Once you've done all that, ensure that your users never accidentally fall off
the bus: protect them by ensuring that their browser does the right thing by
sending a Strict-Transport-Security header.
Setting up HTTPS isn't much work, and has huge benefits for your site and its users. It's well worth the effort.
Resources
- StartSSL offers free domain-verified certificates. You can't beat free. Stepping up to higher grades of verification is, of course, both possible and reasonably priced.
- SSL Server Test: Once you've set up HTTPS for your servers, verify that you've done it right by running it through SSL Labs' server test. You'll get a nicely detailed report that shows you whether you're really up and running.
- Ars Technica's recent article "Securing your Web Server with SSL/TLS" is worth reading for a little more background detail about the nuts and bolts of setting up a server.
- The HTTP Strict Transport Security specification
(RFC6797) is worth skimming for all the
technical information about the
Strict-Transport-Securityheader you could possibly want. - Once you really know what you're doing, one possible next step would be to
advertise that your site should only be reachable via a specific set of
certificates. There's some work underway at the IETF which would allow you to
do just that via the
Public-Key-Pinsheader; still early days, but interesting, and worth following.