Level Up Your Website By Increasing Your Security Score

Paul Knulst  in  Security • 5 min read

Everyone knows it’s really important to have a good security score on several websites. Within this tutorial, I will explain how I used traefik to get one.

Important: I moved the website in the screenshots from https://www.f1nalboss.de to https://ftp.f1nalboss.de after I wrote this article.

Precondition

If you want to apply the content from this tutorial you need to have a Docker environment in Docker Swarm Mode. If you want to know how to set up one for yourself try following this tutorial that I wrote.

Also, you need to have traefik installed as a load balancer because it is used for adding security headers to your website requests. I have written another tutorial that shows how to integrate traefik in your Docker Swarm environment.

If you did not have a Docker Swarm and you don't want to set up one you can try to install traefik as a load balancer on a single machine. I explain how this is done in this tutorial. But keep in mind that for non-Docker Swarm environments you have to adjust the docker-compose files. If you have questions about that just ask in the comments and I will answer them if possible.

How I Added Security Headers

There is a very important website published by Mozilla: The Mozilla Observatory

The Mozilla Observatory has helped over 240,000 websites by teaching developers, system administrators, and security professionals how to configure their sites safely and securely.

I ran a check for my site and got the following result:

First test on Mozilla Observatory with the result: F

After quick research at traefik documentation, I came up with these important headers which I want to implement in my environment:

accesscontrolallowmethods=GET, OPTIONS, PUT, POST, PATCH
accesscontrolmaxage=100
addvaryheader-true
hostsproxyheaders=X-Forwarded-Host
sslredirect=true
X-Forwarded-Proto=https
stsseconds=63072000
stsincludesubdomains=true
stspreload=true
forcestsheader=true
framedeny=true
contenttypenosniff=true
browserxssfilter=true
referrerpolicy=same-origin
featurepolicy=camera 'none'; geolocation 'none'; microphone 'none'; payment 'none'; usb 'none'; vr 'none';
customresponseheaders.X-Robots-Tag=none,noarchive,nosnippet,notranslate,noimageindex,

To add these headers in my traefik installation I added a new middleware to my traefik docker-compose.yml:

    [...]
    - traefik.http.middlewares.security-headers.headers.accesscontrolallowmethods=GET, OPTIONS, PUT
    - traefik.http.middlewares.security-headers.headers.accesscontrolmaxage=100
    - traefik.http.middlewares.security-headers.headers.addvaryheader=true
    - traefik.http.middlewares.security-headers.headers.hostsproxyheaders=X-Forwarded-Host
    - traefik.http.middlewares.security-headers.headers.sslredirect=true
    - traefik.http.middlewares.security-headers.headers.sslproxyheaders.X-Forwarded-Proto=https
    - traefik.http.middlewares.security-headers.headers.stsseconds=63072000
    - traefik.http.middlewares.security-headers.headers.stsincludesubdomains=true
    - traefik.http.middlewares.security-headers.headers.stspreload=true
    - traefik.http.middlewares.security-headers.headers.forcestsheader=true
    - traefik.http.middlewares.security-headers.headers.framedeny=true
    - traefik.http.middlewares.security-headers.headers.contenttypenosniff=true
    - traefik.http.middlewares.security-headers.headers.browserxssfilter=true
    - traefik.http.middlewares.security-headers.headers.referrerpolicy=same-origin
    - traefik.http.middlewares.security-headers.headers.featurepolicy=camera 'none'; geolocation 'none'; microphone 'none'; payment 'none'; usb 'none'; vr 'none';
    - traefik.http.middlewares.security-headers.headers.customresponseheaders.X-Robots-Tag=none,noarchive,nosnippet,notranslate,noimageindex
    [...]

After adding this middleware I updated my traefik service that runs within a Docker Swarm (cf. this article)

docker stack deploy -c docker-compose.traefik.yml traefik

This addition made it possible to use this middleware within every service deployed to my swarm and managed by traefik. To do this I had to add the following line to the *labels section* within the docker-compose.yml:

    [...]
    - traefik.http.routers.simpleweb-https.middlewares=security-headers
    [...]

After restarting the simpleweb service I ran another test and got a B score because of this error:

Content Security Policy Error on Mozilla Observatory

I researched and found the correct traefik header for CSP. Additionally, I created a very strict CSP directive and added it to the header value:

    contentsecuritypolicy=default-src 'none'; img-src 'self' https://i.postimg.cc; script-src 'self'; style-src 'self'"

I exclusively allow access to https://i.postimg.cc for img-src because the only picture I use at https://ftp.f1nalboss.de is hosted there.

Because this header is very strict I did *not create a global middleware* for it. I upgraded the service in which I want to use this CSP directive by adding this line to the simpleweb service and adjusting the middleware:

    [...]
    - traefik.http.routers.simpleweb-https.middlewares=security-headers, simpleweb-csp
    - traefik.http.middlewares.simpleweb-csp.headers.contentsecuritypolicy=default-src 'none'; img-src 'self' https://i.postimg.cc; script-src 'self'; style-src 'self'
    [...]

I restarted the service and ran another check to finally achieve an A+!

The final result on Mozilla Observatory after using security headers in Traefik; result: A+

How I Harden My Website

Because I also want to harden my server I ran a check at hardenize.com and got non-satisfying results for TLS and HSTS.

Due to already having adjusted the traefik headers for HSTS beforehand, the only thing left to do was submit my domain name at hstspreload to fix the *HSTS* issue.

THIS PART IS VERY IMPORTANT: If you want to submit your website to hstspreload.org think about it very carefully. There can be problems if you cannot fulfill everything: read here for information

Solving the TLS issue was more involved. I had to adjust the traefik configuration so that the minimum version of TLS is 1.2 and NOT 1.0, as is the default. To set a minimum TLS version I added a file provider to my traefik installation within the command section of my traefik docker-compose.yml:

   command:
      - --providers.docker
      [...]
      - --providers.file.directory=/configuration/
      - --providers.file.watch=true

Then I created a new configuration file (called tls.toml) which contains an entry *[tls-options]* and should be used to set the minimum TLS version to 1.2. Additionally, I added excellent cipher suites (read this to know about cipher suites).

[tls.options]
  [tls.options.mintls12]
    minVersion = "VersionTLS12"

    cipherSuites = [
        "TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256",
        "TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384",
        "TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_CHACHA20_POLY1305",
        "TLS_AES_128_GCM_SHA256",
        "TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384",
        "TLS_CHACHA20_POLY1305_SHA256"
    ]

    sniStrict = true

This configuration guarantees that traefik will use at least TLS 1.2 with the provided cipher suites. I chose these six cipher suites because I want to have three for TLS 1.2 and three for TLS 1.3 which are declared safe!

I saved the file within the ./configuration/ folder and updated the volume section within the traefik docker-compose.yml:

    volumes:
      [...]
      - ./configuration:/configuration

After that, I restarted the traefik instance.

The last step was activating the min TLS version within the simpleweb service by adding a new label:

    [...]
    - traefik.http.routers.simpleweb-https.tls.options=mintls12@file
    [...]

After a restart of the simpleweb service I retried the test on Hardenize and Mozilla and got the wanted results:

• https://www.hardenize.com/report/f1nalboss.de/1628027450
• https://observatory.mozilla.org/analyze/ftp.f1nalboss.de

There is also an informative test at ssl-labs which checks certificates. With the new configuration, I also got an A+

• https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=ftp.f1nalboss.de

Closing Notes

To simplify everything you can use this docker-compose.yml and run it within any Docker Swarm as www-stack service:

docker stack deploy -c docker-compose-simpleweb.example.yml www-stack

I hope you find this tutorial helpful and are now able to secure your website and increase trust by adding security headers and optimizing SSL usage.

I would love to hear your ideas and thoughts. If you already run a traefik installation and use different headers/middleware or you have other cipher suites please comment here and explain. Also, if you have any questions, please jot them down below. I try to answer them if possible.

This article was originally published on my blog at https://www.paulsblog.dev/harden-your-website-with-traefik-and-security-headers/

Feel free to connect with me on my personal blog, Medium, LinkedIn, Twitter, and GitHub.

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Photo by Peter Conrad / Unsplash