How can I use SSL/TLS with Perfect Forward Secrecy? I'm new to the field of cryptography, but I want to make the web a better web by setting up the sites that I host with Perfect Forward Secrecy.  I have a list of questions regarding the setup of Perfect Forward Secrecy.  Here it goes:


Can my choice of certificate authority hinder the use of Perfect Forward Secrecy?
How can I create the strongest certificate using ONLY Perfect Forward Secrecy (meaning if the browser can't use PFS, it won't load anything)?
Are there any extra settings that I need to know about for configuring my sites to use these certificates (especially since I only want PFS)?
Anything else that I should know, feel free to tell me.  I'm completely new to this idea.
In the beginning SSL handshake, the client sends a list of supported ciphersuites (among other things). The server then picks one of the ciphersuites, based on a ranking, and tells the client which one they will be using. 

This step is the one that determines whether or not the future connection will have perfect forward secrecy. Note that, at this point, certificates have not entered the picture at all. This is because whether or not a connection has perfect forward secrecy is determined by how the session key is derived. And how the session key is derived is determined by the ciphersuite in use. So, the ciphersuites that use ephemeral Diffie-Hellman (DHE) or the elliptic-curve variant (ECDHE) will have perfect forward secrecy while the other options will not.

Thus, in order to configure PFS for your site, what you want to configure is your web server's ciphersuite-selecting options. More on this below.


  Can my choice of certificate authority hinder the use of Perfect
  Forward Secrecy?


No. Perfect forward secrecy protects against the revelation of master keys. CAs do not have access to private (master) keys; a certificate from a CA is a signed public key. The CA is there to say "okay, client, I have verified that the public key here is indeed associated with &lt;host&gt;, it's safe." (Or, rather, the fact that it's signed by the CA says this.) Thus, your choice of CA will not impact PFS in any way.


  How can I create the strongest certificate using ONLY Perfect Forward
  Secrecy (meaning if the browser can't use PFS, it won't load
  anything)?


As you can see, certificates are unconnected with the choice of ciphersuite (and hence PFS).

Instead, the web server you use probably has a ciphersuite configuration in its SSL configuration. There are usually two relevant options: first, the ciphersuites that you want your server to use, and second, how the server picks the ciphersuite. Here is the relevant section in my nginx configuration:

ssl_protocols TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;
ssl_ciphers ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-RC4-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:RC4:HIGH:!MD5:!aNULL:!EDH;
ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;


The first line tells nginx to use those four protocols, as is apparent. The third line tells nginx to prefer its own ciphersuites over the client's. The point here is that we want to control exactly which ciphersuite will be selected. A client may send an ordering that suggests a non-PFS ciphersuite; hence, we trust the server.

The second line is where the magic happens. Note that I manually specify that I want those three ECDHE-* schemes first if they are supported by the client. From there, I fall back to the usual schemes. I feel the need to emphasize that I don't disallow clients that don't support PFS; some encryption is better than no encryption at all. Not all clients do support PFS, so this is pretty important. I realize your question said you want only PFS ciphersuites, but I would advise against that. With the above nginx configuration, the vast majority of connections' selected ciphersuites will have PFS. The configuration for Apache is apparently quite similar, which is not surprising given that both use OpenSSL.

To that end, a useful tool: the SSL Labs SSL Test. It gives you a basic grade on your SSL configuration. See, for example, Google's grade (click on one). It has a little green box under the grade informing you that the site supports PFS for all its tested browsers, and if you scroll down to 'Configuration', you will see a ciphersuite priority list, including which ciphersuites have PFS, as well as "simulated handshake" for the common browsers of the day.