Public Key Pinning is a security feature that tells a web browser to associate a public cryptographic key with a server or servers. When a web browser visits a website for the first time, it will read the HPKP header and store the hashes for the certificates that are provided. Each time the browser then revisits that website, the hash from the provided public key is compared against the stored keys, if the hashes do not match, the web browser should display a warning.

The HPKP header adds protection against man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks but, if incorrectly configured can make your website display a TLS error for a long period of time.

Here’s a look at what this website publishes as it’s HKPK header.

Public-Key-Pins: pin-sha256="cYf9T3Il8DaCnaMaM0LatIAru1vqmcu2JSwS7uvyEB0=";
                 pin-sha256="u2q8QZ8Hjp3o/efZjsch9NKjnZmrISJQjwoi/rmsKLU=";
                 max-age=15768000; includeSubDomains

To explain it, the first pin-sha265 key is the hash of the public key that …

With haproxy 1.5 finally being released we are lucky enough to get a basic interface around OCSP stapling.

Sadly this interface really is quite basic and it’s not the simplest thing to figure out without some trial and error.

According to the official documentation, you should be able to pipe your OCSP response to haproxy via it’s stats socket. Sadly I could not get this to work properly at all, so I decided to swap the piping for a file and reload solution.

You’ll need to get a copy of your certification authorities root certificate to proceed with this.

openssl x509 -in /path/to/your/certificate -text

Authority Information Access …

By default haproxy enables stateless SSL session resumption, but you can enable stateful session resumption in accordance with RFC 5077. This functionality, like the SSL handling it relies on is only available from haproxy 1.5.

no-tls-tickets

bind 0.0.0.0:443 ssl ... no-tls-tickets

I have built and released nginx 1.5.9 with ngx_pagespeed module 1.7.30.3-beta and published them on apt.kura.io.

e3595519df9865941f0bd5c2c28bba18  nginx_1.5.9_all.deb
b2f3e4dcded2ce419175be8f4329b81e  nginx-common_1.5.9_all.deb
379ea6ad2805f3584609617deb5d1db9  nginx-doc_1.5.9_all.deb
140247350a651b24bde7278ce1f18148  nginx-light_1.5.9_amd64.deb
0a28a4965f00a5e739187aa81a16af3f  nginx-full_1.5.9_amd64.deb
e54ab6b670cfe7d56502ef08b6e2656f  nginx-extras_1.5.9_amd64.deb
9bb9b524c523a69f9f263eefbe5f5783  nginx-naxsi_1.5.9_amd64.deb
7b8e254515d3b6f90b8e55c720d314b8  nginx-naxsi-ui_1.5.9_all.deb
389b8b53360695d5fbbff183a3e94c4a  nginx-light-dbg_1.5.9_amd64.deb
b8b44d1519cb59761984bc06159aee85  nginx-full-dbg_1.5.9_amd64.deb
c8139d0abb8a04b22507342a80e6f5ea  nginx-naxsi-dbg_1.5.9_amd64.deb
76466c2c427e7263b3629b413ebd49a6  nginx-extras-dbg_1.5.9_amd64.deb

cc1e71b89c30de80083e55acb4b4cebc0f5f1fd7  nginx_1.5.9_all.deb
07d2bb7bdb038f5491b8707a56dafbf0a10a1b74  nginx-common_1.5.9_all.deb
ba0921fc31ae539fba175ab4392b3bc691593047  nginx-doc_1.5.9_all …

I have previously written an article on using SPDY with haproxy but have been spending some time recently being annoyed that the SPDY check tool said I didn’t advertise a fall back to HTTP over SSL in the NPN protocol list.

After some digging I discovered it was actually quite simple to advertise multiple protocols using npn and haproxy.

Previously my article called for using the following section of configuration at the end of the bind line.

npn spdy/2

To advertise HTTP protocols as well as SPDY you simply need to add them to the npn list, using commas as a delimiter.

npn spdy/2,http/1.1

I have previously released haproxy1.5-dev19 with SSL & SPDY support enabled and nginx 1.4.1 with SPDY support and pagespeed, although I do not remember which version of pagespeed.

I have received a few messages asking me for the latest version of haproxy, nginx and pagespeed so I decided to finally build and release them.

dpkg -l openssl

ii  openssl        1.0.1e-2        amd64        Secure Socket Layer (SSL) binary and related cryptographic tools

I recently wrote an article on using haproxy, SSL and SPDY with nginx backend servers.

This article is a little extra on top of that to explain how to enable statistics for haproxy so you can monitor the backend statuses etc.

Example stats page

listen stats :8000
    mode http
    stats enable
    stats hide-version
    stats realm haproxy\ stats
    stats uri /
    stats auth admin:admin

I wrote an article last week explaining that I had changed my blog and built my own nginx packages with SPDY built in.

I decided I would take things a little further and poke around with haproxy some more. The initial plan was to compile the latest dev source of haproxy with SSL termination enabled.

In doing so I realised I would lose SPDY support, which upset me a little. After some digging I found that the 1.5-dev branch of haproxy supports npn and thus can handle SPDY.

I tweaked my builds a little more and managed to get haproxy running as an SSL terminating load balancer, with SPDY connections being sent off to my nginx servers with SPDY enabled and all other non-SPDY connections were passed on to an nginx virtual host with SPDY disabled.