Essentially this comes down to pressuring distros and server vendors do their homework finally ship with good examples/defaults. E.g. Microsoft IIS (!) has OCSP stapling enabled by default since ages. Apache? Most people still run 2.2, which isn't capable of OCSP stapling at all. Nginx is in a similar position.
That said, the more sysadmins rely on <s>rotten</s>well-proven "Enterprise Linuxes" and "LTS" versions with old libraries and servers, the more security expertise is required from sysadmins to decide where to deviate from the distros default packages to meet current best practices.
On the other hand, security is a moving target and knowing your (Open)SSL setup is as important as e.g. knowing your RoR setup. It's an inconvenient truth, because it requires learning new stuff. I don't see any alternative though, that's why I compiled this material.
Finally, a remark on the "offloading" part: Security is the single thing where delegation becomes hard because it means delegating trust, as in: your private SSL/TLS keys. And that's quite some trust to delegate.
> knowing your (Open)SSL setup is as important as e.g. knowing your RoR setup
Very true, and yet it's so much harder to know your OpenSSL or other security-related setup.
You learn your Rails setup well enough to make your application work, and hopefully well enough to make it performant. If you miss either of those goals, it's obvious to you. You know something's broken, and you grind away until you fix it.
Not so with security. Your system can be "working" by all outward appearances yet be riddled with vulnerabilities. And you won't know it, so you won't see any reason to go and learn more. Nor would you know what you don't know, or where you need to learn more. That's the scary part.
That said, the more sysadmins rely on <s>rotten</s>well-proven "Enterprise Linuxes" and "LTS" versions with old libraries and servers, the more security expertise is required from sysadmins to decide where to deviate from the distros default packages to meet current best practices.
On the other hand, security is a moving target and knowing your (Open)SSL setup is as important as e.g. knowing your RoR setup. It's an inconvenient truth, because it requires learning new stuff. I don't see any alternative though, that's why I compiled this material.
Finally, a remark on the "offloading" part: Security is the single thing where delegation becomes hard because it means delegating trust, as in: your private SSL/TLS keys. And that's quite some trust to delegate.