TLS for Phoenix

HTTP/2 support already available in Phoenix thanks to Cowboy2. Depending on how your load balancing was setup you may now be in a situation where you now need to termiate TLS directly on Cowboy.

When I looked into it there didn’t seem to be a lot of information around it so I decided to assemble the config and details that I used here.

There’s two things that I wanted to do when I set this up:

  1. only use secure tls versions and protocols.
  2. keep the keys encrypted.

My suggestions here are based on the following:

One challenge that we have is the DH params group file. I’d prefer to generate this on the server but it takes too long to be practical. I have excluded it for the time being as it makes not sense to generate it but then store it in a git repos.

However, your deployment process may be different so if you can take advatage of it, generate it as follows:

openssl dhparam -out dh-params.pem 2048

Beyond that we are encrypting our keyfile and then only provide the password to the production ENV. The resulting config looks as follows:

config :phoenix, YourApp.Endpoint,
  https: [
    port: 443,
    cacertfile: "/path/to/certs/cacert.pem",
    certfile: "/path/to/certs/cert.pem",
    keyfile: "/path/to/certs/key.pem",
    password: "keyfile-password-so-read-this-from-the-env",
    versions: [:"tlsv1.2"],
    dhfile: "/path/to/certs/dh-params.pem",
    ciphers: [
      'ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256', 'ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384', 'ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA',
      'ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA', 'ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA256', 'ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA384',
      'ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256', 'ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384', 'ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA',
      'ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA', 'ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256', 'ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384',
      'DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256', 'DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384', 'DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA',
      'DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA', 'DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256', 'DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA256'
    ],
    secure_renegotiate: true,
    reuse_sessions: true,
    honor_cipher_order: true,
    max_connections: :infinity
  ]

In my case, we use distillery and read much of our configuration from the ENV. And we are not generating the DHPARAMS So our file looks more like this:

config :phoenix, YourApp.Endpoint,
  https: [
    port: "${PHX_TLS_PORT}",
    cacertfile: "${CA_FILE_PATH}",
    certfile: "${CERTFILE_PATH}",
    keyfile: "${KEYFILE_PATH}",
    password: "${KEYFILE_PASSWORD}",
    versions: [:"tlsv1.2"],
    ciphers: [
      'ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256', 'ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384', 'ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA',
      'ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA', 'ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA256', 'ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA384',
      'ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256', 'ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384', 'ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA',
      'ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA', 'ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256', 'ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384',
      'DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256', 'DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384', 'DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA',
      'DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA', 'DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256', 'DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA256'
    ],
    secure_renegotiate: true,
    reuse_sessions: true,
    honor_cipher_order: true,
    max_connections: :infinity
  ]

Note that we are setting files paths dynamically which allows us to switch between certificate sets between staging and production ENVs.


Mark Madsen

When I started writing Apps and APIs, phones had buttons!


Recent Stories
09 Jun 2022

Distillery to Releases

13 Jul 2019

10x Song Writers

12 Sep 2018

iPhone X 🅂

Recent Tweets