Security policy design in Nginx

In today's Internet environment, security issues are no longer a minor issue. In order to deal with various possible security threats, many developers and operation and maintenance personnel need to take security into consideration when designing the system. Nginx is a high-performance proxy server widely used in web server environments with excellent performance and reliability. Therefore, when designing security policies in Nginx, you need to pay attention to the following aspects.

1. Security hardening

When building the Nginx server, we must ensure the security of the operating system, such as prohibiting root users from logging in remotely, deleting unnecessary service processes, etc. In addition, Nginx’s own security also needs to be strengthened. Specific measures include:

• Close irrelevant modules: delete unnecessary modules, such as autoindex_module, disable sendfile and accesslog, etc.;
• Set security response headers: such asX-Content-Type-Options:nosniff, X-XSS-Protection:1;mode=block, X-Frame-Options:DENY, etc.;
• Defend against DDoS attacks: Set the connection rate limit and perform some basic checks before letting the client perform some preprocessing tasks, such as checking IP or user-agent;
• Close server_tokens: configure in Nginx Turn off the display of the server version number in the file to prevent attackers from obtaining sensitive information such as the server version number from the header information.

2. Authentication and Authorization

Nginx provides HTTP Basic authentication and Token authentication, which can authenticate users for access requests to control access permissions. For example, add the following configuration to the Nginx.conf file:

location /auth-example/ {
    auth_basic "Please enter password";
    auth_basic_user_file /var/www/password/db;
}

The meaning of this configuration is: when accessing /auth-example/, Nginx will pop up a password prompt box to the user, and then Check if the password is correct. The password will be found in the /var/www/password/db file, which should be generated by the htpasswd command. This configuration has enabled basic username/password authentication in Nginx.

3. HTTP response security

When Nginx acts as a reverse proxy server, all HTTP responses from the server must be forwarded to the client. At this time, the HTTP response body needs to be inspected and filtered to prevent attacks on the client. This can be achieved through Nginx modules, such as adding checks on HTTP response headers to ensure they are correct and do not contain malicious content.

4. Protect SSL encryption

When using HTTPS transmission, you need to consider the protection of SSL encryption. Nginx provides SSL configuration options to turn SSL on and off, and provides features such as SSL certificate verification and certificate chain checking order. Properly configuring the SSL protocol and encryption to suit your environment and needs can help protect your communications and prevent malicious attackers from stealing sensitive data.

In addition, you also need to pay attention to the management of SSL certificates. SSL certificates need to be updated promptly, otherwise an expired certificate may cause your users to experience connection errors. At the same time, in order to avoid unauthorized SSL/TLS certificates being issued by domain hijackers, proper certification and signing processes are required.

Summary

As a high-performance proxy server, Nginx not only has huge advantages, but also has strict security requirements. The above mentioned several aspects that need to be paid attention to when designing the security policy in Nginx, including hardening server security and SSL encryption protection. It is necessary to understand these security features and practice and optimize them, which can fundamentally help protect and increase the security of your project and effectively prevent various attacks.

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