Another quick snippet that I figured out this weekend. It’s not hard, but it’s something that I really wanted to do and had to look up where it was, so perhaps it will help you.

Problem statement:

I run a bunch of local services in my network. They aren’t exposed publicly (I use Wireguard to access them when out and about), so I really don’t need HTTPS. But (rightfully) a number of services behave better when they’re behind HTTPS + if there’s ever a service that’s running amuck (Internet of Things devices?) that’s listening, I don’t want them to see anything.

Options

Option 1: Use Nginx Proxy Manager to request certificates for each subdomain. It works quickly and well. Problem: All certificates are published to Certificate Transparency Logs. I don’t immediately mind exposing what I’m running… but I’d still rather now.

Option 2: Set up wildcard certificates. This requires integration with your DNS provider (since wildcards need a DNS challenge, not TCP).

Of course (based on the title), we’re going with option 2. 😄

read more...

From time to time when doing web development, you need to test something related to HTTPS. In some cases, the application you’re writing already supports HTTPS natively and that’s no problem. But more often (and probably better, in my opinion) is the case when you have another service (be it an AWS ELB or an nginx layer) that will terminate the HTTPS connection for you so your application doesn’t have to know how to speak HTTPS.

In those cases, how can you test functionality that specifically interacts with HTTPS?

Today I will show you autohttps, a thin nginx proxy using Docker and a self signed certificate to automatically create an HTTPS proxy in front of your application.

read more...

In cryptography work, RC4 (Rivest Cipher 4) is well known as both one of the easiest to implement and fastest to run symmetric encryption algorithms. Unfortunately, over time there have been a number of attacks on RC4, both in poorly written protocols (such as in the case of WEP) or statistical attacks against the protocol itself.

Still, for how well it formed, it’s an amazingly simple algorithm, so I decided to try my hand at implementing it.

read more...