Security, speed, compliance, and flexibility -- all of these describe lighttpd (pron. lighty) which is rapidly redefining efficiency of a webserver; as it is designed and optimized for high performance environments. With a small memory footprint compared to other web-servers, effective management of the cpu-load, and advanced feature set (FastCGI, SCGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) lighttpd is the perfect solution for every server that is suffering load problems. And best of all it's Open Source licensed under the revised BSD license.

Web 2.0

lighttpd powers several popular Web 2.0 sites. Its high speed io-infrastructure allows them to scale several times better with the same hardware than with alternative web-servers.

This fast web server and its development team create a web-server with the needs of the future web in mind:

Its event-driven architecture is optimized for a large number of parallel connections (keep-alive) which is important for high performance AJAX applications.


News

1.4.34

January 20, 2014

Important changes

There have been some important security fixes pending (which you should already have gotton through your favorite distribution); I am sorry for the delayed release (we probably should communicate security bugs on our page and mailing lists too for those who are not following oss-security).

We updated the “standard” ssl cipher string recommendation to ssl.cipher-list = "aRSA+HIGH !3DES +kEDH +kRSA !kSRP !kPSK"; see below for the detailed reasons.

Regression warning

The fix for lighttpd SA-2013-01 (CVE-2013-4508, “Using possibly vulnerable cipher suites with SNI”) includes a regression:

Each SSL_CTX also gets loaded with all values for ssl.ca-file from all blocks in the config.

This means that your ssl.ca-files must not contain cyclic chains and should use unique subject names.

See Debian Bug – #729555 for more details.

Security fixes

OpenSSL cipher string recommendation

The cipher string recommendation is based on ssllabs’ SSL/TLS Deployment Best Practices 1.3 / 17 September 2013:

  • BEAST is considered mitigated on client side now and new weaknesses have been found in RC4, so it is strongly advised to disable RC4 ciphers (HIGH doesn’t include RC4)
  • It is recommended to disable 3DES too (although disabling RC4 and 3DES breaks IE6+8 on Windows XP, so you might want to support 3DES for now – just remove the !3DES parts below; replace it with +3DES !MD5 at the end to prefer AES128 over 3DES and to disable the 3DES variant with MD5).
  • The examples below prefer ciphersuites with “Forward Secrecy” and ECDHE over DHE (alias EDH); remove +kEDH +kRSA if you don’t want that.
  • SRP and PSK are not supported anyway, excluding those (!kSRP !kPSK) just keeps the list smaller (easier to review)
  • As almost all keys these days are RSA limiting to aRSA+HIGH make the lists even smaller. Use HIGH instead of aRSA+HIGH for a more generic version.

Not included on purpose:

  • STRENGTH: the list from HIGH is already ordered, reordering is not required. STRENGTH also prefers 3DES over AES128.
  • !SSLv2, !EXPORT, !eNULL, !DES, !RC4, !LOW: HIGH shouldn’t include those ciphers, no need to remove them.
  • !MD5: HIGH might include a 3DES cipher with MD5 on old systems; !3DES should remove MD5 too.
  • !aNULL, !ADH: doesn’t matter on server side, and clients should always verify the server certificate, which fails when the server doesn’t have one.

You can check the cipher list with: openssl ciphers -v 'aRSA+HIGH !3DES +kEDH +kRSA !kSRP !kPSK' | column -t (use single quotes as your shell won’t like ! in double quotes).

Downloads

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