I inherited a weird situation from a client that I'm no expert at. This client has 3 domain names, the main one being, for example, domain-a.com. They also have domain-b.com and domain-c.com redirecting to domain-a.com. All domains live on the same server.
So the problem comes up because they had SSL certs on all 3 domains and the cert on domain-c.com expired and they need to get a new one. This had me thinking, do they even need certs on domain-b or domain-c if it just redirects? Also consider that the domain-c.com domain is the domain of their email, but as far as I know, the two don't affect each other.
TL;DR: Do you need SSL certs on redirects to a page with an SSL cert.
Yes.
The redirection is an HTTP-level action which happens inside the SSL envelope.
The client needs to establish an SSL connection to the original host before it 'sees' the redirect, then after completing the redirect it must establish another SSL connection to the target host.
So you definitely need an SSL certificate on redirects to a page with one.
If you have requests via TLS to domain-b & domain-c than yes, you need TLS support on them.
There's also a security related aspect in this. Plain text communication to domain-b.com & domain-c.com means a plain text redirect to domain-a.com. Because it redirects to SSL only the communication to domain-a.com is secured. This leaves the redirect from domain-b & domain-c vulnerable to a MITM attack. An attacker can intercept the requests and redirect the client to a different site under their control.
This is not easy to prevent, unless you have something like HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS, RFC) in place on all domains and the visitor visited the sites before or they're in preload list of their browser.
In any case, to make it more secure: Upgrade the client to TLS on their first request to any of the three domains, and redirect to https instead of http when going to domain-a from domain-b & domain-c. Use HSTS with preload and HTTP Public Key Pinning on all domains and you're good to go.
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I am facing a weird issue. I do not know if it is Nginx related or DNS related but here is the problem :
I have a domain that is fine, let's say foobar.com , SSL does not face any issue. Both www. and root domain work with HTTPS.
I have a second domain, let's say foobaz.net, I need to redirect it to foobar.com in every situations (both www. and root domains).
It does actually redirect, but when I try to access https://foobaz.net/ I get a HTTPS error/warning before being redirected to https://foobar.com/ after adding it the the SSL exceptions of Chrome (https://foobar.com/ SSL certificate is OK once I get past https://foobaz.net/ SSL warning).
I do not know if it is Nginx related or DNS related, any clue of what is happening here ?
Thanks in advance.
Any https connection checks the ssl certificate before proceeding to do what it needs to do in the server(in your case, a redirection). You may have a certificate for foobar.com, which is perfectly fine, but if you don't have a valid foobaz.com certificate. That's why the error shows up, foobaz is not "secure".
A https connection is secure if all the points between you and the endpoint are secure, not only the endpoint. If foobaz is not certified, that is a non-secure middle point on your connection, and that's why the warning happens.
Get a SSL certificate for foobaz too, and the whole connection will be secure.
I got several https://*.rest-service.mydomain.com. As the number of services increases, I feel managing SSL cert is costly. I bought a wildcard cert for *.mydomain.com.
Newly added services are placed under mydomain.com with a new wildcard cert and it works well. However, as always, legacy is an issue.
I still have a lot of https traffic to https://*.rest-service.mydomain.com, and its old cert is going to expire.
In this situation, is there any good approach to redirect legacy https traffics to the new one?
Since the client still knows only legacy endpoint https://*.rest-service.mydomain.com, can I redirect the client to the new server https://*.mydomain.com and handle the request as well?
I use nginx as a web server and ELB for a load balancer.
... and its old cert is going to expire.
While you can redirect from ssl to ssl (see the other answer) you still need to have a valid certificate for the host you redirect from. This means the redirection will stop working (or at least cause certificate validation errors) once the old cert expired. To fix this you need to renew the certificate.
Apart from that you must be sure that the services can actually deal with redirection. While a browser handles redirection in a transparent way for the user that is not necessary the case for applications using a REST API. These might expect to get the response directly and not a redirection which they have to follow and resubmit the REST request.
Try this regexp-ed server:
server {
server_name ~^(?P<subdomain>.+)\.rest-service\.mydomain\.com$;
listen 443 ssl;
return 301 https://$subdomain.mydomain.com$request_uri;
}
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 made reverse connection to one of web servers on which is SSL applied and the the content is in dir (http://webserver.com/directory) ,so i had to use rewrite rule and that works well.
The thing is that nginx can't pass SSL from backend webserver and i get error on silverlight application..
Could someone advise me on what to do ? Config is very basic as only rewrite is added additionally.
Looking forward for suggestions,ideas,answers.
Best regards.
Edit: pastebin.com/SnyHaUL4
As far as i know, you could say that "it's not a bug, it's a feature", one of the features of SSL that it prevents Man in the middle attacks, if you want to use SSL then nginx it self should have an SSL key and allow https connection, otherwise the user will see the well known yellow warning page about untrusted SSL,
If you implement the SSL for nginx, then the connection would be like this
client -> nginx ssl -> nginx -> server ssl -> server
The connection will be encrypted and decrypted twice on the way to the server, the client wont see the server SSL and will only see the nginx SSL.
If you don't have or don't want to use SSL on your nginx, then you need to make the connection to it unsecured, then the warning won't appear and every thing would work fine.
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://).