HTTPS/Future work

This page contains historical information. It may be outdated or unreliable.

This page appears to have moved to phabricator:T104681.

Scaling up SSL infrastructure

Determine if load from logged-in users is sufficient for benchmarking. Switch certain projects to alternate software/ciphers/pfs/etc to test relative load (possibly with depooling)
Faidon: Apache testing (vs nginx)

Will it be cheaper to expand the frontends, or to expand the terminator cluster?
Split Varnish frontend from backends (SSDs, lots of mem), put SSL terminators with frontends (just CPU)

stud? ~~needs Varnish proxy protocol support~~ (patch written by Mark, nearing completion)
Apache 2.4 + memcached
nginx + session sharing patch (to be written by us or Nginx Inc.)
all above: session tickets need to be either disabled or shared, example strategy: https://blog.twitter.com/2013/forward-secrecy-at-twitter
mark's wcsh LVS scheduler (weighted consistent source hashing)

~~switch to TLSv1.2~~ done, with GCM cipher
~~switch to PFS, ECDHE, where applicable~~ done
- allow only PFS, needs DHE (will break IE6 WinXP, Java6)
  - maybe use the Mozilla recommendation for the ciphersuites - should be possible to support ECDHE with a fallback for IE6 WinXP
  - see also Google IO's HTTPS everywhere video and istlsfastyet.com
move away from SHA1 to SHA256 in certificates (will get disabled in browsers at some point)
- https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=401365
  - https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!msg/blink-dev/2-R4XziFc7A/YO0ZSrX_X4wJ
- https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=942515
rotate SSL session ticket master key daily or disable session tickets altogether
remove wildcards/unified from misc services, switch to individual certs or SSL cluster
investigate shorter expiry for certificates (e.g. 6 months)
Fix broken Apache redirects
Add HTTPS to Wikipedia Zero (needs involvement of the zero partner...)

Zero team must be involved prior to anon default HTTPS (same partner carrier issues as non-HTTPS-countries)

Poorly supported in nginx
mod_spdy doesn't work for 2.4 yet - it's also a big hack with unmerged patches to Apache core
None support ALPN as of this time
Is also a security benefit thanks to pipelining for paylod-size attacks.

Wait and see what development / standardization (HTTP 2.0) looks like when we're ready for HTTPS-by-default

investigate ECDSA certificates -- faidon to investigate more, drop it for v1.1 if it's too complicated

where to procure? cost?
how/when to fallback to RSA (Google requires SNI + *no* deflate support for ECDSA)

SSL terminator UDP logging - Ken will talk to Toby and get the shutdown into the analytics plan
Remove?

The logs are duplicated. We can likely eliminate them if we track XFP
Fix?
Fixing udp2log is probably pointless at this point as it's about to be replaced with Kafka...

only solution at the moment is to enable by language-wiki, which is suboptimal (especially in terms of feedback)
- GeoIP is in progress (see 80166 and 80175
login.wikimedia.org

Needs to be more than separate IP. If login happens over https, the redirection cookie is added. Also, login itself occurs per wiki and doesn't redirect to login.wm.o (iframes are used for that), so credentials would still be passed in the clear.

Feature	nginx 1.1	nginx 1.5	Apache 2.4	stud
TLSv1.2	Y	Y	Y	N
PFS	Y	Y	Y	Y
Performance	+	+	?	++?
Lightweight (no HTTP parsing)	N	N	N	Y
Shared session backend	N	N	Y	Y
Session ticket key rotation	N	kind of²	N	?
OCSP stapling	N	Y	Y (untested)	N
ECDSA certificates	?	N	Y (untested)	?
SPDY	N	Y	Y¹ (untested)	N/A

² multiple keys can be specified; rotating those then needs to be triggered external of nginx; cf. [1] [2]