I've been tasked to add security by means of certificates to an external web service we call from our ASP.NET 4.0 Webforms application.
I've been able to play around with the certificate and get the code to work properly, but there are still a lot of questions unanswered when it comes to deployment of that solution. I'm pretty new to actually using (and dealing with) certificates - I understand the basic theory behind them, just never used them much myself.
The service is an external REST webservice provided by a company which also issues the certificates - and those will expire on a yearly basis and need to be renewed yearly. So "baking" them into the ASP.NET app as an internal resource doesn't seem like a good idea.
I'm leaning towards putting them into the certificate store on the Windows 2008 Server. That works fine, but what I'm not sure about: how do I FIND the appropriate certificate from code? I know about the X509Certificate2 and X509Store classes - but what criteria should I search for?
What item (Serial number? Thumbprint?) would remain the same if that cert has to be renewed every year? Or do I have to update my config and store a new serial number or thumbprint every time the cert has been renewed?
If I understand correctly you need to ensure that you are communicating with correct web service.
You are using https to connect to the REST service. Is it a WCF service or Web API? Either way the web server will handle the SSL part (hmm, only if hosted on a web server and not self hosted). So if we make it easy then the web service is hosted on a web server. The web server will handle establishing SSL connection and will send you server certificate.
Then you need to check if you are communicating with correct web server. Your options are:
manually update config file with thumbprint that will change every time the certificate of web server will be renewed. Also serial number will change when they renew the certificate.
check for common name in the subject or better if the is correct DNS name (of the web server) in Subject alternative name (SAN = extension in the certificate) or in CN (when SAN is not in the certificate)
build a certificate chain (using X509Chain.Build method) from web server's certificate and check if it contains a CA certificate that you have embedded in ASP.NET application or if it matches given thumbprint of CA from you config.
1) - will work but you have to ensure to update config file every year
2) - will work nice until they change DNS name of the web server, but it would result in change of your web.config so ... it will work. One thing to note is that extracting any extension from X509Certificate2 class using standard .NET framework is not easy. You would need to either go to ASN.1 level or use some crypto library that can extract the SAN in a friendly way.
3) - will work nicely. You can use Root CA certificate or dedicated intermediate CA certificate. You have to ensure that web server certificate is trusted for certificate chain to be built but that applies generally to all solutions. It will work pretty long time because CA certificates are issued to i.e. 20-30 years.
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I have to develop a web application that is both secured over https and uses client authentication certificates. The clients are connecting via invitation, thus it is not intended for users stumbling upon this application by googling around.
The ideal would be to get an intermediate CA certificate form a public root authority and sign both the ssl certificate and use it to issue client authentication certificates. I think that won't work, as simply put I will never qualify for such an intermediate CA (as far as I know, but maybe I am wrong with that).
Second guess: create own Root CA, an intermediate CA and use them. Because of what I wrote about the users, I can embed the necessary certificate chain in the issued certificates. This technically works.
What I would prefer is to get an ssl certificate from public authority and to use my own chain to issue authentication certificates and verify the users. According to this it is possible. But I haven't found anything about how to configure IIS for example (or Kestrel) to request client certificates issued by a specific CA, even less some standard specification where this flow is described.
We have a simple system with a REST service (WebAPI) that will be hosted on one machine (hosted on IIS on a custom port, port numer 3031) and with a website hosted on another machine that will be talking to the service.
We want both to use SSL, so as I understand we will need to purchase two separate SSL certificates for the production deployment on the Internet.
Does that sound right?
If so, then I don't know how do I request and purchase a certificate for the WebAPI REST service... The service will be hosted on a custom port 3031, should I purchase a normal certificate for the domain name of the machine where the service will be hosted? And then should I basically install the certificate on the IIS on that machine (like it's described here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/web-api/overview/security/working-with-ssl-in-web-api).
How will I be able to perform a verification of the domain for the purchased certificate if I'm going to use the certificate for a REST service on a custom port? (not for a regular website).
Apologies for my ignorance, I have searched the forum to find an answer to my issue, but I didn't find one, maybe it's because my very limited knowledge about certificates and security.
I'm developing an application on Azure VM and would like to secure it by using the wildcard SSL certificate that I'm already using with my main domain. The SSL cert works with any *.mydomain.com and the application on Azure VM is accessible through myapplication.cloudapp.net
Based on the research that I've done, CNAME should be the best option to do that (I can't use A record since we need to shutdown the VMs every week and turn them back on the next week and will lose the ip addresses).
My two questions are:
How can I have myapplication.cloudapp.net be shown as subdomain.mydomain.com?
Will doing that make it possible for wildcard SSL certificate to be used for Azure application too?
How can I have myapplication.cloudapp.net be shown as
subdomain.mydomain.com?
Yes - this is just the CNAME forwarding and ensuring that the appropriate SSL certificate is installed on the server.
Will doing that make it possible for wildcard SSL certificate to be used for Azure application too?
Well as you're already exposing the Application through the VM - this should happen seemlessly.
Just a word of caution, you mention that you're using the certificate on the main domain, but haven't mentioned where you're using this. Be aware that, out-of-the-box, you can only assign one SSL per HTTPS endpoint. You can enable multiple SSL certificates on an Endpoint for Azure / IIS using Server Name Identification and can be enabled directly or automatically. If you do take this route, remember to configure your SNI bindings first, then apply the default binding - it kinda screws up otherwise.
I am working with a client who needs SSL on their Email and Web Site.
We have their site hosted on a Rackspace Cloud Site (Wordpress so Apache and all that jazz).
From what I can tell their Email is on an ISS server of their own.
They want to apply this SSL Cert they bought through GoDaddy and apply it to this email server and to the site on our hosting server. Now I am only a Web Developer with enough server knowledge to get sites launched and running, But I don't think you can apply the same SSL Cert on two different types of servers.
What would the solution be for this?
Would you purchase a second ssl? Is that even possible?
Sorry if this is a all completely wrong I am trying to use my limited knowledge of SSL to describe the situation.
I'm pretty sure you can use the same certificate if it's going on two servers as long as they are both using the same domain. You don't need to purchase a second ssl. The tricky part might be if the two servers require different certificate file formats.
Also, just do the CSR part on ONE of the servers (use the one you trust the most). On the other server just install the certificate bypassing the CSR part.
We are doing a project in Scala, using Lift to provide some REST style web services for clients (Java-script through AJAX). For some business reasons we decided to put it all under SSL but I'm am not sure where to start. Insights would be much appreciated.
Whatever server software is currently handling HTTP traffic (e.g. Jetty, Nginx, Apache...) almost certainly has some means of adding SSL support and disabling plain HTTP; try that first.
As for the basic mechanism of adding SSL support, it goes something like this:
Generate an RSA keypair (the key size should be at least 1024 bits). This step should prompt you to fill in some information about you, your organization, and the server's hostname ("common name" in X.509 parlance). It should also prompt you for a passphrase, which will be used to encrypt the private key.
The keypair consists of a private key (this is the part you shouldn't share with anyone) and a self-signed certificate, which contains, along with other metadata, the public key.
If you want to get a real cartel-signed SSL certificate, so that members of the general public won't see nasty warnings when they visit your site, you'll need to generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) from your keypair and submit that to an SSL certificate authority, who will create a certificate derived from your CSR, but signed with their private key. Luckily, in recent years, the SSL CA business has gotten extremely competitive, so pricing shouldn't be a major hurdle anymore.
If you're not planning to get a real cartel-signed SSL certificate, you can use the private key and self-signed cert as-is.
Either way, you need to tell your web server how to find the certificate (whether self-signed or CA-signed) and private key. Apache HTTPD prefers to keep the two things in separate files; most JVM servers prefer that they be encapsulated in a keystore. The best keystore format for general use is called PKCS#12, it's an industry standard. Making a PKCS#12 file out of a separate key and cert is a bit tricky, look on ServerFault if you can't figure it out. :)
You usually want to put the private key passphrase in the server's configuration file, so make sure that configuration file (and the file containing the private key) have the most restrictive permissions that will still work.
This depend on which application server you're running.
Jetty: http://docs.codehaus.org/display/JETTY/How+to+configure+SSL
Tomcat: http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-5.5-doc/ssl-howto.html
Glassfish v2: http://blogs.oracle.com/enterprisetechtips/entry/using_ssl_with_glassfish_v2
Glassfish v3: http://javadude.wordpress.com/2010/04/06/getting-started-with-glassfish-v3-and-ssl/
You're not sure where to start with which bit? The SSL?
Set up stunnel (or similar) in front of your webapp, and firewall your webapp off so that only stunnel can access it. Then your clients can only access your webapp over SSL, via stunnel.