HSTS and Certificate Management: A Real-World Fix
A few years ago, I helped clean up a messy HTTPS rollout for a mid-sized SaaS app. On paper, the setup looked fine: valid TLS cert, HTTPS redirect, load balancer in front, and a decent-looking security checklist in the wiki. In production, it was shaky. Users could still hit http:// directly. Some static assets loaded from old subdomains with mismatched certificates. One internal team wanted to turn on HSTS preload immediately because they’d read that “preload means maximum security.” That would have been a great way to lock broken TLS behavior into every browser. ...