How to protect your site from information leakage?

Content:

The material is updated in February 2022. The security of information on the Internet is one of the most serious topics in our time. How to protect your site from information leakage and unauthorized access by third parties? What is a SSL certificate and where to get it? What is HTTPS better than http? We offer you a material that is aimed at people who do not have special technical knowledge and skills.

The SSL protocol (from the English Secure Sockets Layer - the level of secure sockets) is used by millions of sites to protect data on the Internet. It guarantees a safe connection between the user browser and the server. When using SSL protocol, information is transmitted in an encoded form by HTTPS. It can only be decrypted using a special key, in contrast to the usual HTTP protocol. For the operation of the SSL protocol, a SSL certificate is installed on the server.

The SSL certificate is a kind of unique digital signature of your site. Such a certificate is needed, first of all, to banks, payment systems and other organizations working with personal data - to protect transactions and prevent unauthorized access to information.

So, if you are an organization and want to use our plugin to collect the donations of the Online Leak , then you need to use the SSL certificate to connect the Yandex.Money payment system .

The SSL certificate contains the following information:

• the domain name for which the SSL certificate is issued;
• legal entity that owns a certificate;
• physical location of the owner of the certificate (city, country);
• the validity of the certificate;
• Details of the SSL-serpenter supplier company.

The SSL certificate confirms that the domain belongs to the real company and that its owner has the right to use the secret key on legally.

HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) is an expansion of the HTTP protocol that supports encryption. The data transmitted by the HTTP protocol are “packaged” to the SSL or TLS cryptographic protocol. By default, HTTPS uses 443 TCP port (for unprotected HTTP - 80).

To prepare a web server for processing HTTPS connections, the administrator must receive and install the server certificate in the system. The certificate consists of two parts (two keys) - Public and Private. The Public part of the certificate is used to encrypt traffic from a client to a server in a secure connection. Private part-to decipher the encrypted traffic from the client on the server.

After a pair of keyproots/public are generated, a request for a SSL certificate to the certification center is formed on the basis of a public key.

There is an opportunity to create such a certificate without contacting the certification center. Such certificates are signed by the same certificate and are called self-signed.

There are several types of SSL-certificates:

SSL-certificates with Domain Validation are entry-level certificates, are the most common in the world. The speed of issuing such certificates varies from 2 to 10 minutes, depends on the brand. To get such a certificate, special documents are not required. Such certificates are suitable for small sites and small projects, when there is no need for great trust from customers and visitors to the site. It is necessary to confirm the possession of the domain:

• Checking through e -mail (DCV email) - the certification center sends a verification letter in which there will be a link to confirm the possession of the domain. You can send such a letter to the mail indicated in Whois of your domain or one of the golden five: [email protected] , [email protected] , [email protected] , [email protected] , [email protected] of your site;
• DNS CNAME verification is a method for those who have the MAL-server configured, and the mail in Whois is closed by private registration. It is necessary to create a special entry in your DNS, and the certification center will check it. The method is fully automatic;
• Chesh file check (HTTP CSR HASH) - The user will be provided with a special .txt file that must be downloaded to his server. At the same time, the certification center will be convinced of its availability and the certificate will be issued. The method is fully automatic.

SSL-serity with the company's verification (Business Validation -such certificates are relevant for those who think about trust in their products, companies and services. Since the certification center conducts a more thorough check. It is necessary to send documents to the company, go through the “Vyzna” process to the corporate phone.

SSL-certificates with expanded verification - only EV certificates will provide the site with a green targeted line in a browser. Most often, such certificates can be found in banks, online systems with a large number of visitors.

SSL serity with subdomains (WildCard) is a very convenient certificate when it comes to protecting a large number of subdomains within the framework of one domain. He can protect any number of subdomains on an unlimited number of servers.

SAN SSL-seditions are unified communication certificates that can protect many domains, subdomains, local domains and servers. These certificates work with both external and internal domain names.

SGC SSL certificates are obsolete certificates that forcibly increase the encryption level for old browsers from 40 bits to full 256 bits.

Codesigning SSL SSL - such certificates can help when your users receive warnings and errors when downloading software code from your resources. This is an ideal product for software developers, it is used to protect software products distributed on the network.

To obtain a certificate, you must contact the company that issue SSL-seditions. For example, in RU-Center is the largest recorder of domains and one of the leading hosting providers in Russia. The cost of the SSL certificate for 1 year can be from 2600 to 5000 rubles. Often the SSL certificate may be included in the site of hosting site.

We also wrote about the free SSL for any site from Cloudflare . Perhaps this option is suitable for your site.