Introduction
The problem is, in short, this. I've been using 'Virtualmin' for a while now, mainly becuse it works better (in my opinion & for my purposes) than VestaCP, Ajenti, Direct Admin (Evolution), CPanel, Sentora, and most of the 'ISP' series.
In doing this, I could already do just about everything via CLI / FTP, this was just a more coherent option for everyone to work together, and to where others could solve their own problems. Getting used to Virtualmin / Webmin didn't take long, but I've run into a problem that is, for lack of a better word, puzzling.
I run SSL certificates on all of my sites via a combination of 'Let's Encrypt' and sometimes Cloudflare, since I use it to manage DNS and mitigate DDOS attacks (when necessary to turn it on) anyway. In addition, I limit the TLS versions, set my own cipher via the global directives, and enabled HSTS.
Now however, I have a piece of software that, for some reason, can't connect to its REST API if the site is under a SSL layer and / or Proxy. So, I tried to disable the SSL certificate enforcement to temporarily rectify the problem. However, after removing it, I realized that with HSTS enabled, I could no longer travel to the normal 'HTTP' version of the site. I removed the HSTS line in the directives, but it's still persisting.
I'm also getting security warning because of a certificate mismatch happening with Virtualmin. For some reason, SSL certificates on other domains are applying to the current one. I've checked each individual site's .conf file, as well as each one's directives (and SSL Directives), as we as looking for anything that would do it in the global directives. The situation looks kind of like this.
Domains & Tiers
Example.com (Domain One)
--Analytics.Example.com (Sub-domain under the above One)
ExampleTwo.com (Different Domain, 'Domain Two')
--App.ExampleTwo.com (Sub-domain under above 'Two')
Essentially, the SSL certificate from Analytics is being pushed onto the App subdomain (That's under a different domain), in addition to App's own SSL certificate. When I shut off the SSL certificate for Analytics, and the one for App, the top layer's (Example.com) SSL certificate is then forced onto the 'App' sub-domain. I would've thought that this would've had to manifest in either the site directives, their SSL directives, or the SSL.Conf in the global directives, but there's nothing there. I have yet to find a fix for this.
Related
I just found out today that .app domain names require SSL certs. I purchased it for a DNS redirection to a site that already has SSL cert setup, so my question is if it's possible to set this up?
I am using Google Domains and it's giving me an error when setting a synthetic temporary redirection to my domain name.
This synthetic record has an error and will not function correctly:
The SSL Certificate for this domain hasn't been created yet. This process may take up to 24 hours to complete.
The required link to "https://my-existing-site.com" is not present.
An SSL certificate is missing.
Any ideas?
Yes, it works without setting up SSL!
Don't setup a synthetic record manually.
Tap on "Website", then follow the link to setup forwarding.
You will need to wait 1 to 24 hours for it to work out.
I can't use my SSL certificate on subdomains because it is for the top level domain www.tld.com only. When I force it on a subdomain e.g. dev.tld.com I get a warning.
What I want to achieve is a development subdomain on the same shared hosting webspace where I can test under real conditions, especially concerning payment systems where an SSL connection is mostly mandatory.
My question is: Do I have to get an extra certificate or is it possible to just click the warning away and make use of https? Am I obliged to buy a certificate in order to use SSL technically? At least it seems to work once I've told my browser to trust the subdomain ...
The warning is telling you that the domain name listed in the certificate does not match the domain name you browsed to. You will still have an SSL connection. Since you are the one that configured the environment, you can ignore the warning.
Having said that, a wildcard SSL certificate is not much more expensive than one for a single domain (shop around!). I would suggest your next SSL certificate be for a wildcard domain (*.tld.com). That will avoid the issue of the warning entirely.
I have an apache server with multiple named hosts all working fine for port 80 http traffic.
(A VPS with one unique IP address)
I have one domain that has a SSL certificate and that domain is configured to handle both http and https traffic.
However if someone accidentally adds https to the beginning of a none SSL configured URL I get a typical certificate warning error (expected) and then if the user accepts the error (depending on the browser) it displays the SSL site I have configured instead of the original non-ssl domain.
I've read up a bit about SNI, but I don't have certificates for each of the other domains and would rather the server either not respond to the SSL request on anything else but one specific domain or redirect to the http version of the site.
Suggestions please as to how I approach this.
Kind regards, Spencer
For security reasons, what you're trying to achieve cannot work.
The browser (which implements the mechanisms to check the certificate) cannot know whether the user typed https:// instead of http:// accidentally or intentionally. Since it's ultimately up to the users to check that https:// is used when they think it's required, browsers should simply perform the actions requested by the users.
A redirection from https:// to http:// should always start with a valid https:// connection. SNI won't help you much there if you can't have valid certificates for the initial connection.
Otherwise, it would be fair for browsers to assume there may be a MITM attack in progress. Typing in https:// explicitly (or using HSTS) is the only reliably mechanism against MITM tools like SSLstrip, which would otherwise be capable of downgrading (or preventing an upgrade from http:// to https://).
I'm sure this is an FAQ but I couldn't find anything I recognized as being the same question.
I have several web-apps running in Tomcat, with some pages e.g. the login page protected by SSL as defined by confidentiality elements in their web.xmls. One of the apps also accepts client-authentication via certificate. I also have a rather extensive JAAS-based authorization & authentication scheme, and there is all kinds of shared code and different JAAS configurations etc between the various webapps.
I really don't want to disturb any of that while accomplishing the below.
I am now in the process of inserting Apache HTTPD with mod-proxy and mod-proxy-balancer in front of Tomcat as a load balancer, prior to adding more Tomcat instances.
What I want to accomplish for HTTPS requests is that they are redirected 'blind' to Tomcat without HTTPD being the SSL endpoint, i.e. HTTPD just passes ciphertext directly to Tomcat so that TC can keep doing what it is already doing with logins, SSL, web.xml confidentialty guarantees, and most importantly client authentication.
Is this possible with the configuration I've described?
I am very familiar with the webapps and SSL and HTTPS and Tomcat, but my knowledge of the outer reaches of Apache HTTPD is limited.
Happy to have this moved if necessary but it is kind of programming with config files ;)
This sounds similar to this question, where I've answered that it's not possible:
You can't just relay the SSL/TLS traffic to Tomcat from Apache. Either
your SSL connection ends at Apache, and then you should reverse proxy
the traffic to Tomcat (SSL [between Httpd and Tomcat] is rarely useful in this case), or you make
the clients connect to Tomcat directly and let it handle the SSL
connection.
I admit it's a bit short of links to back this claim. I guess I might be wrong (I've just never seen this done, but that doesn't strictly mean it doesn't exist...).
As you know, you need a direct connection, or a connection entirely relayed, between the user-agent and the SSL endpoint (in this case, you want it to be Tomcat). This means that Apache Httpd won't be able to look into the URL: it will know the host name at best (when using Server Name Indication).
The only option that doesn't seem to depend on a URL in the mod_proxy documentation is AllowCONNECT, which is what's used for forward proxy servers for HTTPS.
Even the options in mod_proxy_balancer expect a path at some point of the configuration. Its documentation doesn't mention SSL/HTTPS ("It provides load balancing support for HTTP, FTP and AJP13 protocols"), whereas mod_proxy talks at least about SSL when mentioning CONNECT.
I would suggest a couple of options:
Using an iptables-based load-balancer, without going through Httpd, ending the connections in Tomcat directly.
Ending the SSL/TLS connection at Httpd and using a plain HTTP reverse proxy to Tomcat.
This second option requires a bit more configuration to deal with the client certificates and Tomcat's security constraints.
If you have configured your webapp with <transport-guarantee>CONFIDENTIAL</transport-guarantee>, you will need to make Tomcat flag the connections as secure, despite the fact it sees them coming from its plain HTTP port. For Tomcat 5, here is an article (originally in French, but the automatic translations isn't too bad) describing how to implement a valve to set isSecure(). (If you're not familiar with valves, they are similar to filters, but operate within Tomcat itself, before the request is propagated to the webapp. They can be configured within Catalina) I think from Tomcat 5.5, the HTTP connector secure option does exactly that, without requiring your own valve. The AJP connector also has a similar option (if using mod_proxy_ajp or mod_jk).
If using the AJP connector, mod_proxy_ajp will forward the first certificate in the chain and make it available within Tomcat (via the normal request attribute). You'll probably need SSLOptions +ExportCertData +StdEnvVars. mod_jk (although deprecated as far as I know) can also forward the entire chain sent by the client (using JkOptions +ForwardSSLCertChain). This can be necessary when using proxy certificates (which are meaningless without the chain up to their end-entity certificate).
If you want to use mod_proxy_http, a trick is to pass the certificate via an HTTP header (mod_header), using something like RequestHeader set X-ClientCert %{SSL_CLIENT_CERT}s. I can't remember the exact details, but it's important to make sure that this header is cleared so that it never comes from the client's browser (who could forge it otherwise). If you need the full chain, you can try out this Httpd patch attempt. This approach would probably need an extra valve/filter to turn the header into the javax.servlet.request.X509Certificate (by parsing the PEM blocks).
A couple of other points that may be of interest:
If I remember well, you need to download the CRL files explicitly for Httpd and configure it to use them. Depending on the version of Httpd you're using, you may have to restart it to reload the CRLs.
If you're using re-negotiation to get your client-certificate, a CLIENT-CERT directive will not make Httpd request a client certificate as far as I know (this is otherwise done via a valve that can access the SSLSession when using the JSSE connector directly). You may have to configure the matching path in Httpd to request the client-certificate.
A co-worker told me that when you visit a website over SSL the certificate no longer guarantees that you're actually dealing with the intended recipient. This is due to something called "multi-domain SSL certificates". A quick google search seems to show these exist - but I was always under the impression SSL provided encryption and authentication. Is this no longer the case? Surely this is a step in the wrong direction?
There are wildcard certificates, which allow all hosts in one domain to be covered by the same cert. They're more expensive to get issued (since the CAs wouldn't make as much money as if you'd ordered multiple separate single-domain certs), but when you need to cover multiple hostnames in your domain with ssl, it can be quite a savings.
A properly issued cert will cover at LEAST one host name, like www.example.com. And with wildcarding, can cover *.example.com.
SSL by itself guarantees nothing in the way of identification - simply that the link is encrypted. Any certificate will do that for you - even self-signed ones. What you get with the "commercial" certs is a (theoretically) trustworthy third party saying "we've verified that the person who this www.example.com certificate was issused to really is www.example.com"
In addition to given answer, i would like to add few points about SAN (multidomain SSL). First of all, wildcard is not a multi-domain ssl, it only protects unlimited sub-domains as already explained by Marc.
To protect multiple domains like:
domain.net
domain.com
mail.domain.com
newdomain.com
you will require SAN certificates that start from just $60.
you can configure multi domain with SSL on both UBUNTU and REDHAT by following the document Multi domian with ssl