OK, you've got your SSL certificate and you have tengine or nginx setup, but you need it secure. After all, you've heard of all the recent DH attacks, BEAST, CRIME, FREAK, Heartbleed and others, right? Is your system already secure? Test it! Check out The SSL Labs Test Site. I'm getting an A+ rating! The following assumes tengine, but nginx is exactly the same, just s/tengine/nginx/g;

Need a certificate? OK - I highly recommend StartSSL. It's FREE! These guys will step you through the process by following the instructions on their site. If you have problems, the tech support via email is instantaneous and incredibly professional. My cert was the free variety, but if I ever upgrade, I will go to them because the support (to a non-paying customer no less) was so good.

OK ... Make a file /etc/tengine/ssl.conf (or equiv for nginx):

>#- Ports to listen on, all addresses, IPv6 and IPv4listen					  [::]:443 ssl;listen					  443 ssl;#- Support current SSL standards and options onlyssl_session_cache		   shared:SSL:10m;ssl_session_timeout		 10m;ssl_protocols TLSv1		 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;ssl_prefer_server_ciphers   on;ssl_ciphers				 "EECDH+AESGCM:EDH+AESGCM:AES256+EECDH:AES256+EDH";ssl_session_tickets		 off;ssl_stapling			    on;ssl_stapling_verify		 on;#- And some security related headersadd_header Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=63072000; includeSubdomains; preload";add_header X-Frame-Options DENY;add_header X-Content-Type-Options nosniff;

Now, go into your sites-available and in the server{} configuration for the site you want to include SSL, add these lines:

>include				 /etc/tengine/ssl.conf;ssl_dhparam			 /etc/ssl/tengine/dhparam4096;ssl_trusted_certificate /etc/ssl/tengine/startssl_trust_chain.crt;ssl_certificate		 /etc/ssl/tengine/ssl-unified.crt;ssl_certificate_key	 /etc/ssl/tengine/ssl.key;

Now, there are 4 files here for SSL in addition to the one we just included. Let's look at where they come from. First, you should have a certificate file (ssl.crt in the following), and a key for that file (private_ssl.key). The CRT begins with "-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----", but you will need to view this in vi, not less (less will try to decode many of these files). Your private key is password protected (the key is "-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----" followed by a line that says ENCRYPTED). Since you probably don't want to issue a password every time you start your server, let's fix that first.

>openssl rsa -in private_ssl.key -out /etc/ssl/tengine/ssl.key

Easy enough? And we have one of our lines done. 3 to go!

The next is to create a chain of certificates back to the root. For StartSSL, you download their cert:

>wget https://www.startssl.com/certs/class1/sha2/pem/sub.class1.server.sha2.ca.pem

Then make the file you need with your cert and theirs. Here's your next 2 files!

>cat ssl.crt sub.class1.server.sha2.ca.pem  > /etc/ssl/tengine/ssl-unified.crtcp sub.class1.server.sha2.ca.pem /etc/ssl/tengine/startssl_trust_chain.crt

Now, the final command for the final file:

>openssl dhparam -out /etc/ssl/tengine/dhparam4096 4096

4096 might be overkill, but 1024 is the minimum and you might as well go all out just in case 1024 gets broken next month!

Be sure all these files are secure!

>chmod 0600 /etc/ssl/tengine/*

Delete originals, clean up, then restart tengine.

Next I'll cover gzip compression, detecting mobile client, and joomla configuration. Any particular one anyone wants to see first?