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.
Related
I am developing an app with a server part programmed in Go and a client programmed in C#, the connection between the two is made using TCP socket communication, and to ensure the connection I am using TLS.
My question is whether there would be any security problem in my case when using self-signed certificates for TLS communication.
I understand that for a web server that uses https it is necessary to use certificates signed by a certificate authority (CA) but in my case, when connecting my own client application I don't see why I should use one of these.
If anyone knows anything about it, it would be a great help.
Certificates are used for authenticating the end points, and usually the cert is signed by a certificate authority which your client (such as a web browser) already trusts. Using a self-signed cert in that scenario can lead to problems, as the browser won't trust it, and so will pop a warning box. However, the real issue is that for the typical user, a warning from your server is as good as indistinguishable from an attacker using another self-signed certificate. They'll click-away and KABOOM!
If this is a closed environment, and you control both the server and client, then the self-signed certificate is irrelevant. In fact, you don't even need one at all, and may be better off with one of the alternatives, like TLS-PSK, or TLS-SRP.
Good day,
My web application need to connect to IBM third party to get some response. Thus, IBM give me a .p12 file which contain of client certificate.
At first I import this .p12 file into my existing CellDefaultKeyStore, and it will hit certificate chain error.
com.ibm.jsse2.util.j: PKIX path building failed: java.security.cert.CertPathBuilderException: PKIXCertPathBuilderImpl could not build a valid CertPath.; internal cause is:
java.security.cert.CertPathValidatorException: The certificate issued by xxx is not trusted; internal cause is:
java.security.cert.CertPathValidatorException: Certificate chaining error
Then I go import this .p12 file into NodeDefaultKeyStore, and surprisingly its work. My application able to call to the third party and get reponse code 200.
I am not understand how to explain to my client on this.
As my understanding, management scope in CellDefaultKeyStore is bigger because its in cell, NodeDefaultKeyStore should consider part of cell only, suppose CellDefaultKeyStore should work.
Anyone can advise on this?
Just to shortly explain few concepts:
CellDefaultTrustStore - is store for signer certificates, for the servers that you connect to, to be trusted. It is shared by all the nodes and servers by default
NodeDefaultKeyStore - is store for private certs, so the certs that are used for client authentication. Each node by default has its own store and private cert to authenticate.
CellDefaultKeyStore - is store for private certs associated with the cell. Used by deployment manager, not nodes serving apps. It is NOT used by federated nodes.
NodeDefaultSSLSettings - this manages SSL config for the given node, you can check it. By default it is using NodeDefaultKeyStore (not CellDefaultKeyStore), and CellDefaultTrustStore
But back to your question.
If you need to connect to some service using client certificate authentication, what you should do is:
create new keystore with cert from the p12 file
create new truststore with all signer certs required to connect to that service
create new SSL Config that will point to these stores
create Dynamic outbound endpoint SSL configuration settings, pointing to your ssl config, select correct client cert, and specify connection info in the form protocol,host,port
This configuration will be picked up when you will be doing outbound ssl connection that matches info you entered.
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.
I made a tool that exposes a web-interface for the localhost. Now, i require this web-interface to register a https prefix for a page. For this i'm using BouncyCastle to generate a root certificate and a ssl certificate. This all works well (generating, signing and binding to port). IE displays the page by https without certificate warnings etc.
However, when a third party app tries to display the webpage, it fails (unable to load and displaying 'about:blank'). Because it is an embedded webbrowser i am not sure what the exact problem is. Thus, along other stuff, i tried to use fiddler to maybe determine the problem - only to find it DOES accept the certificate fiddler generates.
So what i have done is exporting the fiddler certificates and removed all custom certificates from the stores. Then, i imported the fiddler certificates on the exact same stores where my generated certificates are. I also made sure that the build up (all stuff you can inspect by viewing the certificate properties) are exactly the same. By using Windows MMC, clicking the certificates i can see NO difference, even the order is the same. Critical and such - all match. The only thing that is slightly different: the serial number from my certificates are shorter then the ones generated by fiddler.
So what i end up with are 4 certs (I deleted all the original from fiddler): 1 ssl and 1 root from fiddler and 1 ssl and 1 root from BouncyCastle. The roots are in trusted and the ssl in personal, both on localmachine. Now, when i use netsh to bind the fiddler cert to the port, it works. When i bind my own certificate to the port, it fails.
I have no idear why as all the properties look the same to me.
There is one thing though (again, i have no idea what is going wrong, so this might be irrelevant): on the SSL cert (so not the root one) the SKI points to nowhere (or, at least, i dont see where it points to), but this seems to be the case on the fiddler cert as well. Obviously for both certs the Authority key id point to their respective roots. The SKI on the SSL cert is set by
certificateGenerator.AddExtension(X509Extensions.SubjectKeyIdentifier, false, new SubjectKeyIdentifierStructure(subjectKeyPair.Public));
BTW, i use a VM for testing wich is reset everytime, so i don't think i messed up the cert store somewhere along the way. The tool stays the same, the only thing that changes is the bound certificate, both are registered to 'localhost'
IE thirdparty browser
fiddler's good good
Own's good fail (without message)
Why can 2 seemingly identical certs have a different impact? Is there anything i'm missing in hidden properties or something? And, if so, what should i look for?
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.... Minutes after this post i saw the flaw... It had not to do with the certificate at all, but the way it was bound to the port.... I used code from Mike Bouck to bind the certificate. This line was causing the problem...
configSslParam.DefaultFlags = (uint)NativeMethods.HTTP_SERVICE_CONFIG_SSL_FLAG.HTTP_SERVICE_CONFIG_SSL_FLAG_NEGOTIATE_CLIENT_CERT;
Changing the flags to 0 made it work....
Wasted hours.... :(
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.