Getting More A+ SSL Ratings

In this post I mentioned about getting an A+ rating on ssllabs.com.  It was not easy for me to get an A+ on some of the other sites like HT Bridge, but I finally got it!  And with it I got compliance with:

  • PCI DSS
  • HIPAA
  • NIST

I’m impressed, and here is how I did it.

I’m still using Let’s Encrypt for my security certificates, but I’ve made a change to how I’m getting them.  I’ve added the must-staple flag to certbot.  I’m using DigitalOcean and their DNS with the CertBot DO DNS plugin, so my command looks like this:

To use this plugin you will need to get an API key from DO with write permission. I saved mine to /root/.secrets/certbot-digitalocean.ini, and it needs to be formatted like this:

In order to use it, I needed to make some changes to my /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-apache.conf and /etc/apache2/mods-available/ssl.conf files.  This is what they look like now.