We have Nginx in the front of our system and we Proxy to Apache at the back. We use SSL/TLS for our connection.
Question:
- Is Nginx the best option to terminate SSL/TLS connections in terms of performance / SSL Handshake?
- Am I doing all the needed performance tweaks? Can I still improve my code?
Here's my config:
ssl_certificate /path/ssl.crt;
ssl_certificate_key /path/ssl.key;
ssl_dhparam /path/dh.pem;
ssl_buffer_size 4k;
ssl_session_timeout 4h;
ssl_session_cache shared:SSL:20m;
ssl_session_tickets on;
ssl_trusted_certificate /path/trust.crt;
ssl_stapling on;
ssl_stapling_verify on;
resolver 8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4 valid=300s;
resolver_timeout 5s;
I use Mozilla SSL Configuration Generator to generate my ciphers below.
ssl_protocols TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;
ssl_ciphers 'ECDHE-ECDSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:ECDHE-RSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-DES-CBC3-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA:EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA:AES128-GCM-SHA256:AES256-GCM-SHA384:AES128-SHA256:AES256-SHA256:AES128-SHA:AES256-SHA:DES-CBC3-SHA:!DSS';
ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;
The cipher was to accomodate most of the browsers. I also have Strict-Transport-Security set.
Our system runs on Amazon AWS with CloudFront. Currently it takes SSL Labs around 130 seconds to run a test. And Pingdom shows the SSL connection for one request takes at least 220ms.
Thanks!