Daily Archives: 2014-05-29

Light Blue Touchpaper now on HTTPS

Light Blue Touchpaper now supports TLS, so as to protect passwords and authentication cookies from eavesdropping. TLS support is provided by the Pound load-balancer, because Varnish (our reverse-proxy cache) does not support TLS.

The configuration is intended to be a reasonable trade-off between security and usability, and gets an A– on the Qualys SSL report. The cipher suite list is based on the very helpful Qualys Security Labs recommendations and Apache header re-writing sets the HttpOnly and Secure cookie flags to resist cookie hijacking.

As always, we might have missed something, so if you notice problems such as incompatibilities with certain browsers, then please let us know on <lbt-admin@cl.cam.ac.uk>. or in the comments.