SSL Hardening Guide

Get SSL/TLS hardening recommendations and score

About SSL/TLS Hardening

SSL/TLS hardening is the process of configuring your server to use the most secure version of the TLS protocol while disabling weak and deprecated algorithms. Proper hardening protects against downgrade attacks, protocol vulnerabilities, and cipher suite weaknesses. Our SSL Hardening Guide evaluates your server against industry best practices from OWASP, NIST, and the Mozilla Security Guidelines, providing a hardening score and prioritized remediation steps.

How to Use

Enter the domain name of the server you want to evaluate.
Specify the port if your service runs on a non-standard port.
Click Check to analyze your server's TLS hardening level.
Review your hardening score and follow the recommended steps to improve security.

Use Cases

Security Baseline: Establish a hardening baseline for all servers in your organization.
Compliance Enforcement: Ensure servers meet internal security policies and regulatory requirements.
Vulnerability Remediation: Identify and fix weak configurations after a security incident.
Infrastructure Audit: Conduct regular hardening audits across your server fleet.

Frequently Asked Questions

SSL/TLS hardening involves disabling insecure protocols (SSL 2.0, SSL 3.0, TLS 1.0, TLS 1.1), enforcing strong cipher suites, enabling security features like HSTS and OCSP stapling, and configuring proper key exchange parameters to protect against known attacks.

SSL 2.0, SSL 3.0, TLS 1.0, and TLS 1.1 should all be disabled due to known vulnerabilities (POODLE, BEAST, CRIME, etc.). Only TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3 should be enabled for modern and secure connections.

A score of 90-100% indicates strong hardening with modern protocols and ciphers. Scores below 70% suggest significant security improvements are needed. Our tool provides specific recommendations to help you increase your score.

Because it protects the one moment every other measure cannot. A perfectly configured TLS stack still allows a visitor's first request to be intercepted before any redirect to HTTPS happens, and a certificate warning can be clicked through. HSTS tells the browser to go straight to HTTPS without asking, which closes that window permanently for any domain you control. Everything else on this page protects traffic that has already started correctly.

Start conservatively: max-age of a few hundred seconds or an hour, with includeSubDomains once every subdomain genuinely serves HTTPS. Test that nothing breaks under HTTPS-only before raising max-age, because the header is honoured for its full duration with no way to shorten it from the client side. Submits the domain to the preload list only when you are certain, since removal from that list is effectively impossible.

Yes, and it is the single highest-value change on this page. 1.3 removes CBC suites, static RSA key exchange and compression outright rather than deprecating them, completes in fewer round trips, and cannot be downgraded by an active attacker. Keeping 1.2 alongside it for older clients costs nothing, so there is rarely a reason not to have both.

A future compromise of the private key. With ephemeral key exchange, each session derives keys that cannot be recovered from the long-term key, so an attacker who obtains your private key years later cannot decrypt traffic recorded today. Without it, recorded sessions can be decrypted once the key leaks. This is why re-keying matters more than key strength for long-lived data.

Because these three checks read a single negotiated connection, so they cannot see cipher lists you never offered, protocols disabled only for other client types, or settings on a load balancer that terminates TLS before reaching your origin. Treat the score as confirmation that these three specific properties hold for this connection — valuable, and narrower than it looks. Read it alongside a configuration review for the full picture.

How the Score Is Built

This page measures three specific properties of a live deployment and turns each into points. Nothing is inferred from configuration files it cannot read.

1HSTS is worth the largest single allocation, and is checked by fetching the site and reading the response header rather than by assuming it. This inverts the usual emphasis, and deliberately so: a strong cipher protects traffic after it starts, while HSTS protects whether it starts on HTTPS at all.
2TLS 1.3 is the second allocation, read from the negotiated version. Everything else being equal, 1.3 removes more classes of weakness than any other single setting.
3Forward secrecy is the third, awarded when the negotiated cipher uses ephemeral key exchange. It is the smallest allocation because most modern suites already provide it.

Every deduction arrives with the recommendation attached, so a low score tells you what to change rather than only that something is wrong. The three checks are independent, and a site can fail one while passing the others.

Tips & Best Practices

•Start with the most critical fixes: disable SSL 3.0 and TLS 1.0/1.1
•Test configuration changes on staging before applying to production
•Keep a backup of your current working configuration before hardening
•Use the verification tool after applying changes to confirm effectiveness

Technical Details

Protocols: TLS 1.2 and 1.3 configuration recommendations
Ciphers: Curated cipher suites for security and performance balance
Headers: HSTS, CSP, and other security header configuration
Servers: Nginx, Apache, HAProxy, and IIS specific configurations