TLDR;

http/2 over tls with nginx is already a reality, how can we achieve the best performance of it? check the example configuration.

Introduction

We all know that http/2 is right here and although it doesn’t impose the TLS usage, the major browsers already took their side (a.k.a only supporting http/2 over TLS).

The support for http/2 was released with nginx 1.9.5 (except for “Server Push”). But isn’t HTTPS a lot slower than good old HTTP? Well, this is not easy to answer but we can fine tune nginx to do much better than the default configuration.

I really believe that the biggest fight is against latency not CPU load, the tips you’ll see here are mostly about reducing RTT in order to decrease latency.

Before we move on to the practical tips, let’s revise the simple tasks you must to do first:

1. upgrade to the latest kernel (3.7+)
2. upgrade to the latest openssl (1.0.1j)
3. upgrade to the latest nginx (1.9.5)

These tips above will get you a lot of improvements but let’s go to the optimization tips:

TLS session resumption

What?

When you want to use HTTPS, your browser needs to negotiate the session (certificate, cipher, hash algorithm, tls version, key …), in a very simplistic way it does follow the steps:

1. Establish a TCP connection (SYN, SYN/ACK, ACK)
2. Negotiate and establish the TLS session

When you leave the site and come back later, the browser will need to renegotiate the session. TLS session resumption is the technique to partially skip this negotiation by persisting the session for later usage.

The left graph represents an over simplified version of a full TLS handshake (skipping TCP handshake) and on the right side you can see how TLS resumption works, the point is to skip RTT.

  

Why?

If we skip part of the session negotiation we’ll delivery fast content.

How?

We do have two ways of solving this issue: saving the session (TLS) on server (session cache) or preferable on client (session ticket).

session cache

ssl_session_cache   shared:SSL:10m;
ssl_session_timeout 1h;

In this case when client tries to reconnect, the server will try to recovery past persisted session skipping partially the negotiation. With this shared session (of 10m), nginx will be able to handle 10 x 4000 sessions and the sessions will be valid for 1 hour.

However, there are problems with this approach:

1. sessions are stored on the server;
2. the “shared session” is saved in each server, so multiple nginx’s will not share the same session;

For the second problem, the great project openresty is about to release a new feature (ssl_session_store_by_lua) which will enable us to save these sessions in a “central” repository (like redis).

session ticket

# $> openssl rand 48 > file.key
ssl_session_tickets on; 
ssl_session_ticket_key file.key;

In this case, the server will create a ticket and send it to the client, when the client tries to connect again it’ll use the ticket and the server will just resume the session.

Nginx comes with session tickets enabled by default but if you will deploy your application in more than one box (bare metal, cloud, virtual machines, containers …) you’ll also need to specify the same key (used to create the tickets), you should rotate this key often.

Although this approach is much better than session cache, not all browsers support this so you might need to offer both solutions.

TLS false start

What?

How about to have the same benefit (skipping RTT) as in TLS resumption but when the browser first negotiate with the server?! This is possible by using and enforcing the forward secrecy.

Instead of waiting the last handshake step from server, the browser will already send the data (request) and the server will reply with the data (response). This technique is known as TLS false start.

  

Why?

Less RTT means faster site/video/image/data to final users.

How?

This is possible because we can extend the tls protocol by instrument it with specific ciphers.

ssl_protocols TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;
ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;
ssl_ciphers 'ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:DHE-DSS-AES128-GCM-SHA256:kEDH+AESGCM:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:DHE-DSS-AES128-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA256:DHE-DSS-AES256-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-DES-CBC3-SHA:AES128-GCM-SHA256:AES256-GCM-SHA384:AES128-SHA256:AES256-SHA256:AES128-SHA:AES256-SHA:AES:CAMELLIA:DES-CBC3-SHA:!aNULL:!eNULL:!EXPORT:!DES:!RC4:!MD5:!PSK:!aECDH:!EDH-DSS-DES-CBC3-SHA:!EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA:!KRB5-DES-CBC3-SHA';

OCSP stapling and certificate chain

What?

Creating trust is a hard task to do and part of the responsibilities of TLS is to enforce it. In order to establish this trust the browser (or you OS) needs to at least have one point to trust.

In a very simplistic way, your browser believes that http://www.example.com is which it claims to be based on a chain of trust, it checks by:

1. looking at its certificate and then checking if its signature is valid (checking all the certificates until the ROOT)
2. looking if the certificate is not revoked by either searching it in CRL (certificate revocation list) or issuing a new request OCSP (Online Certificate Status Protocol)

Both steps might force your browser to do more RTT, if your server doesn’t provide the intermediate certificates the browser will need to download them and it might even request an OSCP (requiring more RTT: DNS, TCP_HANDSHAKE, TLS_HANDSHAKE).

Why?

Less RTT means faster site/video/image/data to final users 2.

How?

You can concatenate your certificate with its chain (except ROOT, it’s not necessary, in fact the browser won’t trust your ROOT) then avoiding extra RTT to download the missing certificates.

$ cat mysite.cert ca1.cert > full.cert
...
ssl_certificate /path/to/full.cert

You can set up nginx to avoid OCSP by stapling (this “staple” is digitally signed which makes possible for your browser to check its authenticity) the OCSP response on your server then you will avoid extra RTT for OCSP.

ssl_stapling on; 
ssl_stapling_verify on; 
ssl_trusted_certificate /path/to/cas.pem

TLS record size optimization

What?

Although the maximum size of a TCP packet is 64K, a new TCP connection starts with much less than this maximum.

And each TLS record can hold at maximum 16K (which is the default size for nginx), summing up this size plus the headers of tcp and ip the server might need to make 2 RTT to serve the first bytes. And that’s not cool.

TCP is great but it has limitations, it is not ideal for all kinds of applications and there is even “quic” efforts to make web faster with experimentations using UDP instead of TCP.

Since we’ve reached our current speed limits, light speed, (who knows what “quantum” can do) we’re moving to avoid extra RTT.

*you can’t use QUIC on nginx yet.

Why?

Less RTT means faster site/video/image/data to final users. 🙂 Again!!!

How?

There is a tradeoff here, you can either chose throughput (TLS record size to max) or latency (a small record size). It would be great if nginx could offer an adaptive option, starting small (4K, to speed up the first bytes) and after 1 minute or 1MB it increases for 16K.

ssl_buffer_size 16k; #for throughput, video applications
#ssl_buffer_size 4k; for quick first byte delivery

HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security)

What?

HSTS “converts” your site to a strict HTTPS-only, it eliminates unnecessary HTTP-to-HTTPS redirects by shifting this responsibility to the client, most of the browsers support it. Even if you forgot to change http for https the browser will do that for you.

Why?

Redirects means more RTT, yeah I know it’s getting repetitive but it’s to reduce latency.

How?

A simple http header to instruct the browser.

add_header Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000; includeSubdomains"; 
#'max-age' values specifies how long browser should follow this rule.

Why Chrome doesn’t show/accept http2?

Users of the Google Chrome web browser are seeing some sites that they previously accessed over HTTP/2 falling back to HTTP/1. You can check what, why and how at nginx site.

Summary

It’s all about making web faster avoiding RTT (later I’ll post tips specific to http/2), so here’s a check list:

• Upgrade to the latest: kernel, openssl and nginx.
• Use TLS resumption and TLS false start
• `cat` your certificate with the intermediates
• Think about the best size (hard) for you TLS record
• Enforce HSTS 😉

Here’s the full config example:

# command to generate dhparams.pen
# openssl dhparam -out /etc/nginx/conf.d/dhparams.pem 2048

limit_conn_zone $binary_remote_addr zone=conn_limit_per_ip:10m;
limit_req_zone $binary_remote_addr zone=req_limit_per_ip:10m rate=5r/s;
limit_req_status 444;
limit_conn_status 503;

proxy_cache_path /var/lib/nginx/proxy levels=1:2 keys_zone=backcache:8m max_size=50m;
proxy_cache_key "$scheme$request_method$host$request_uri$is_args$args";
proxy_cache_valid 404 1m;

upstream app_server {
  server unix:/tmp/unicorn.myserver.sock fail_timeout=0;
}

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name *.example.com;
  limit_conn conn_limit_per_ip 10;
  limit_req zone=req_limit_per_ip burst=10 nodelay;
  return 301 https://$host$request_uri$is_args$args;
}

server {
  listen 443;
  server_name _;

  limit_conn conn_limit_per_ip 10;
  limit_req zone=req_limit_per_ip burst=10 nodelay;

  ssl on;

  ssl_stapling on;
  ssl_stapling_verify on;
  ssl_trusted_certificate /etc/nginx/conf.d/ca.pem;

  ssl_certificate /etc/nginx/conf.d/ssl-unified.crt;
  ssl_certificate_key /etc/nginx/conf.d/private.key;
  ssl_protocols TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;
  ssl_ciphers 'ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:DHE-DSS-AES128-GCM-SHA256:kEDH+AESGCM:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:DHE-DSS-AES128-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA256:DHE-DSS-AES256-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:AES128-GCM-SHA256:AES256-GCM-SHA384:AES128-SHA256:AES256-SHA256:AES128-SHA:AES256-SHA:AES:CAMELLIA:DES-CBC3-SHA:!aNULL:!eNULL:!EXPORT:!DES:!RC4:!MD5:!PSK:!aECDH:!EDH-DSS-DES-CBC3-SHA:!EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA:!KRB5-DES-CBC3-SHA';
  ssl_dhparam /etc/nginx/conf.d/dhparams.pem;
  ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;
  ssl_session_cache shared:SSL:10m;
  ssl_session_timeout 10m;

  root /home/deployer/apps/example.com/current/public;

  gzip_static on;
  gzip_http_version   1.1;
  gzip_proxied        expired no-cache no-store private auth;
  gzip_disable        "MSIE [1-6]\.";
  gzip_vary           on;

  client_body_buffer_size 8K;
  client_max_body_size 20m;
  client_body_timeout 10s;
  client_header_buffer_size 1k;
  large_client_header_buffers 2 16k;
  client_header_timeout 5s;

  add_header Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000; includeSubdomains"; 

  keepalive_timeout 40;

  location ~ \.(aspx|php|jsp|cgi)$ {
    return 404;
  }

  location ~* ^/assets/ {
    root /home/deployer/apps/example.com/current/public;
    # Per RFC2616 - 1 year maximum expiry
    # http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html
    expires 1y;
    add_header Cache-Control public;
    access_log  off;
    log_not_found off;

    # Some browsers still send conditional-GET requests if there's a
    # Last-Modified header or an ETag header even if they haven't
    # reached the expiry date sent in the Expires header.
    add_header Last-Modified "";
    add_header ETag "";
    break;
  }

  try_files $uri $uri/index.html $uri.html @app;

  location @app {
    proxy_set_header X-Url-Scheme $scheme;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;

    # enable this if you forward HTTPS traffic to unicorn,
    # this helps Rack set the proper URL scheme for doing redirects:
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For-Forwarded-Proto $https;

    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_redirect off;
    proxy_pass http://app_server;
  }

  error_page 500 502 503 504 /500.html;
  location = /500.html {
    root /home/deployer/apps/example.com/current/public;
  }
}

With this configuration I was able to get an A+ at SSLlabs, this is a useful tool where you can check what you need to do to make your SSL site better, it gives you specific tips (apache, nginx, IIS).

I strongly recommend you:

• to watch Ilya Grigorik’s presentation @ nginx.conf 2014;
• read TLS is fast yet?;
• read the amazing book High Performance Browser Networking;
• to understand more about these ciphers and perfect secrecy go to Mozilla tls