Encryption

Out of the box, every Deployment you create using Now is served over a HTTPS connection. The SSL certificates for these unique URLs are automatically generated and free of charge.

Furthermore, any HTTP requests to your Deployments are automatically forwarded to HTTPS using the 301 status code:

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Content-Type: text/plain
Location: https://<your-deployment-host>

It is not possible to disable this redirection or prevent the Deployment from being served over HTTPS as it is considered an industry standard to serve web contents over a secure connection.

Note: if the client that as issuing requests to your Deployment wants to establish a WebSocket connection, please ensure it is connecting using HTTPS directly, as the WSS protocol does not support redirections.

Supported TLS Versions

Now supports TLS version 1.2.

Supported Ciphers

In order to ensure the integrity of the data received and sent by any Deployment running on the Now platform, we only support ciphers with forward secrecy.

The following cipher algorithms are supported at the moment:

ECDH+AESGCM:ECDH+AES256:ECDH+AES128:DH+3DES:!ADH:!AECDH:!MD5:!EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA

Support for HSTS

Only the .now.sh domain (and therefore all of its sub domains, which are the unique URLs you receive when creating a deployment) supports HSTS.

You can enable by setting the Strict-Transport-Security (more details) header to the following value in your Deployment:

max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains;

Theoretically, you could set the max-age parameter to a different value (it indicates how long the client should remember that your site is only accessible over HTTPS), but since we do not allow connections made over HTTP, there is no point in setting it to a shorter value, as the client can just remember it forever.

Note: you can try whether your site qualifies for HSTS Preloading here. It also allows submitting the domain to Google Chrome's hardcoded HSTS list. Making it onto that list means your site will become even faster, as it is always accessed over HTTPS right away (instead of the browser following the redirection issued by our Network layer).

How Certificates Are Handled

The unique URLs generated when creating a deployment are handled using a wildcard certificate issued for the .now.sh domain.

When custom certificates are generated using now certs issue, however, their keys are placed in our database and encrypted at rest within the Network layer.

Then, once a hostname is requested, the certificate and key are read from the database and used for establishing the secure connection. In addition, both are cached in memory for optimal SSL termination performance.

Full Specification

Any features of the encryption mechanism that were left uncovered are documented here. You only need to make sure to select any IP address of your choice (it does not matter which one you pick – the results are the same for all).