Copyright Disney, I don’t think they’ll sue me. Thanks for the image.
After reading Eric Martindale‘s very useful blog post on “Mitigating TLS BEAST attack in node.js” I decided to implement this for pinitto.me in order to increase security of the site.
After implementing the suggested code I then attempted to test the SSL setup via SSLLabs. Sadly the report came back showing that pinitto.me was still vulnerable to BEAST attacks.
A BEAST (or Browser Exploit Against SSL/TSL) attack is an attack where a third party can silently decrypt communications between a browser and a server. This is performed by attacking a weakness in CBC (cipher block chaining) discovered back in 2006 but with a practical exploit not found until late 2011.
BEAST attacks are not possible on TLS versions greater than 1.0 but as this version is currently the most predominant on the internet such attacks are possible on most unprotected servers.
The documentation on SSLLabs.com suggested a different set of ciphers to those suggested by Eric and so after implementing these pinitto.me is now reported to not be vunerable to these attacks, yey!
The code for setting up a HTTPS server on node.js therefore becomes:
var https = require('https')
, fs = require('fs')
var options = {
key: fs.readFileSync(config.ssl.key, 'utf8'),
cert: fs.readFileSync(config.ssl.cert, 'utf8'),
ca: fs.readFileSync(config.ssl.ca, 'utf8'),
ciphers: 'ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:AES128-GCM-SHA256:RC4:HIGH:!MD5:!aNULL:!EDH',
honorCipherOrder: true
}
https.createServer(options, function (req, res) {
res.writeHead(200)
res.end("Hello World!")
}).listen(443)
Notes
- This code is implemented in the pinitto.me proxy code which is a wrapper around nodejitsu’s great node-http-proxy module.
- Pinitto.me’s SSL security support: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=pinitto.me
- Scan your site here: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/index.html
- This code is tested against node.js version 0.8.24