I am using a VPS which doesn't host any website, or domain name. I need to remote-access that VPS using Remote Desktop.
To be sure no one is eavesdropping my traffic with the VPS, I need to setup an SSL certificate on the server. But the first thing they ask is a Fully Qualified Domain Name. Is there any way I can skip creating a domain that I don't need in order to buy the certificate? Since I will only need it for my remote desktop sessions?
Here are the facts:
1- You need a fully qualified domain name to request a certificate.
2- You don't have to bind the domain to the server in case you don't want to.
3- After installing the certificate, if the server address is not the same as the domain associated with the certificate, you will get a warning that the address doesn't match the certificate.
Hope this will help anyone who has case similar to mine.
Related
we have an web application(WAMP stack) on a local Windows server. There are several dependencies and an Oracle db running on this server and the server is closed to outside internet traffic.
Clients access the app on LAN using the server's IP, but we plan to create a virtual hostname in active directory to enable access using a hostname on entire local network.
We would like to secure the traffic and switch to https, thus we need a SSL certificate, preferably from a trusted CA to avoid any confusing warnings to the users.
Is there a way to get a Trusted CA SSL certificate for a local host? I was thinking of getting a certificate for a public domain, say myapp.net, then map this domain to actual ip of the local server running the app and install the certificate in apache... would that work?
Thank you for any ideas.
Alexander
You have several options:
The public CAs that your browser trusts by default will only sign keys for DNS names. And you can totally have a DNS name that is not accessible from the public internet (e.g. one that resolves to a local IP). In case you're using CAs like LetsEncrypt (Domain Validated), you will need to make the server available publicly during the key exchange/certification time, but can change the IP immediately afterwards (*). Or simply use one of the other available validation techniques - typically they're paid.
As you're on the intranet, you might be in a situation where you can install your own internal trusted CA on your users' computers. In that case, you can mint such a certificate yourself. This is a scenario that's common in case there's a proxy running internally that's also inspecting https traffic.
And, of course, in case you can install trusted root CAs on computers, you can also install individual trusted keys/certificates for a single machine. But that seems not to be what you'd like to do.
So, for https://myapp you'll have to do some minting/installation yourself. For https://myapp.example.com, you have options with (already) trusted root CAs
(*) that is for the commonly used and documented mode-of-operation. See Patrick's comment below
Scenario:
I have built a job board for a client and am running that website on my server while the client’s main website is still hosted in its original location.
client.com (root) is on client’s server
jobs.client.com on my server
“jobs” is set up on client.com as an “A” record pointing to the IP address of my server. A real subdomain has not been created on client.com’s server.
Problem:
I am getting a SSL error because it seems jobs.client.com is not covered by a certificate.
Question:
Is it just a matter of time before client.com’a certificate provider will detect and cover the new subdomain?
Or will I need to add a certificate to jobs.client.com on my server?
Is it just a matter of time before client.com’a certificate provider will detect and cover the new subdomain?
No.
Or will I need to add a certificate to jobs.client.com on my server?
Yes. The certificate covering the hostname specified in the URL needs to be explicitly installed at the server which serves this hostname. It is unclear what kind of certificate your server currently provides, but likely the wrong one.
I still new for Bitnami serve.
Now i setup Bitnami server on AWS. I still don't have Domain name. Right now, im using IP Domain to access it. the question is, Do i really can setup SSL encryption (HTTPS) by using IP domain?
i was followed this documentation https://docs.bitnami.com/general/how-to/generate-install-lets-encrypt-ssl/
but it required domain name.
please help
Here a bitnami engineer, if you want to use HTTPS you need a domain. Let's Encrypt not allow IP, you need to search another or create a self-signed certificate.
To the last one, you can use OpenSSL.
I've got an ssl certificate for what I think is my domain and I want to apply it to two separate applications in that domain that run under ASP classic in IIS on Windows 2000.
I have the following stupid questions:
Are certificates issued for URLs or domains? Or subdomains?
Can I use the same cert for multiple websites (applications) within that domain, or do I need a separate one?
Can I inspect the cert file to determine for what or to whom it's issued?
Thanks!
1) Web certs are issued to a domain. Specifically the CN attribute of the certificate must match the domain used to access your site.
2) Certs are usually install per host (or virtual host). If you had cert for the domain wwwapps.domain.tld you could have one app at /calendar, and one app at /contacts.
3) Yes, depending on the format and where it is, this can be easy or hard. If you have a crt file and you are running under windows, just click on it. You should see the details.
If you want to inspect a certificate that is installed on a site, you usually have to click on the padalock icon.
On windows you can also open up the MMC, add the certificate snapin and see any/all installed certificates on the local machine, or your profile.
They are issued for domains. Subdomains require their own certs. You can buy a special wildcard cert for your domain that lets you create certs for your subdomains, but they are more expensive.
If you buy a cert for mydomain.com, you can use it for anything that starts with https://mydomain.com/
Yes. You can do this for any certs. check out the lock icon in your browser's address bar.
It's usually issued to a single web server host (basically a computer cname or a record) like foo.bar.com where foo is one name for the host which the certificate request was generated for and bar.com is its domain.
Thus it will work for any application or virtual directory that responds to https://foo.bar.com - like https://foo.bar.com/planner/ - but nothing more.
For https://*.bar.com you can get a wildcard certificate that lets you handle any number of hosts without any hassel - at a greater cost.
There are also multiple-SAN (UCC) certificates that can contain a specific number of host names in a single certificate like webmail.bar.com and autodiscover.bar.com for an Exchange 2007 server serving both web access and Outlook Anywhere from the same physical machine and NIC.
If it's in .cer format simply opening it in Windows will show the details, if it's a pfx or in some other transport format you'd need to import it.
You basically install the certificate on a Web Site node in IIS and anything you can fit beneath that (or modify using a modern firewall in front of it to still respond to the issued common name foo.bar.com) will work.
Thanks! I enabled port 443 for the site at the domain on the cert, loaded the cert via directory security in IIS for each subfolder, and enabled 128-bit encryption. Worked like a champ!
I'm setting up a webserver for a system that needs to be used only through HTTPS, on an internal network (no access from outside world)
Right now I got it setup with a self-signed certificate, and it works fine, except for a nasty warning that all browsers fire up, as the CA authority used to sign it is naturally not trusted.
Access is provided by a local DNS domain name resolved on local DNS server (example: https://myapp.local/), that maps that address to 192.168.x.y
Is there some provider that can issue me a proper certificate for use on an internal domain name (myapp.local)? Or is my only option to use a FQDN on a real domain, and later map it to a local IP address?
Note: I would like an option where it's not needed to mark the server public key as trusted on each browser, as I have not control over workstations.
You have two practical options:
Stand up your own CA. You can do it with OpenSSL and there's a lot of Google info out there.
Keep using your self-signed cert, but add the public key to your trusted certs in the browser. If you're in an Active Directory domain, this can be done automatically with group policy.
I did the following, which worked nicely for me:
I got a wildcard SSL cert for *.mydomain.com (Namecheap, for example, provide this cheaply)
I created a CNAME DNS record pointing "mybox.mydomain.com" at "mybox.local".
I hope that helps - unfortunately you'll have the expense of a wildcard cert for your domain name, but you may already have that.
You'd have to ask the typical cert people for that. For ease of use I'd get with the FQDN though, you might use a subdomain to your already registered one: https://mybox.example.com
Also you might want to look at wildcard certificates, providing a blanket cert for (e.g.) https://*.example.com/ - even usable for virtual hosting, should you need more than just this one cert.
Certifying sub- or sub-sub domains of FQDN should be standard business - maybe not for the point&click big guys that proud themselves to provide the certificates in just 2 minutes.
In short: To make the cert trusted by a workstation you'd have to either
change settings on the workstations (which you don't want) or
use an already trusted party to sign your key (which you're looking for a way around).
That's all your choices. Choose your poison.
I would have added this as a comment but it was a bit long..
This is not really an answer to your questions, but in practice I've found that it's not recommended to use a .local domain - even if it's on your "local" testing environment, with your own DNS Server.
I know that Active Directory uses the .local name by default when your install DNS, but even people at Microsoft say to avoid it.
If you have control over the DNS Server you can use a .com, .net, or .org domain - even if it's internal and private only. This way, you could actually buy the domain name that you are using internally and then buy a certificate for that domain name and apply it to your local domain.
I had a similar requirement, have our companys browsers trust our internal websites.
I didnt want our public DNS to issue public DNS for our internal sites, so the only way to make this work that I found was to use an internal CA.
Heres the writeup for this,
https://medium.com/#mike.reider/getting-firefox-chrome-to-trust-your-internal-websites-internal-certificate-authority-a53ba2d4c2af
i think the answer is NO.
out-of-the-box, browsers won't trust certificates unless it's ultimately been verified by someone pre-programmed into the browser, e.g. verisign, register.com.
you can only get a verified certificate for a globally unique domain.
so i'd suggest instead of myapp.local you use myapp.local.yourcompany.com, for which you should be able to get a certificate, provided you own yourcompany.com. it'll cost you thought, several hundred per year.
also be warned wildcard certificates might only go down to one level -- so you could use it for a.yourcompany.com and local.yourcompany.com but maybe not b.a.yourcompany.com or myapp.local.yourcompany.com, unless you pay more.
(does anyone know, does it depend on the type of wildcard certificate? are sub-sub-domains trusted by the major browsers?)
Development purpose only
This docker image solves the problem (thanks to local-ip.co): https://github.com/medic/nginx-local-ip.
It launches a reverse proxy in the port 443 with a public cert that works with any *.my.local-ip.co domain. Eg. your local IP is 192.168.10.10 → 192-168-10-10.my.local-ip.co already points to it (it's a public domain)! Assuming the app is running in your computer at the port 8080, you only need to execute this to proxy pass your app and expose it at the URL https://192-168-10-10.my.local-ip.co:
$ APP_URL=http://192.168.10.10:8080 docker-compose up
The domain is resolved with any public DNS you have configured in the devices where you want to access the app, but your traffic keeps local between your app and the client (through the proxy), so you can even use it to connect with devices within the same LAN network, without any of the traffic going out to internet, all the traffic is local.
The reason that is mostly useful for development is that anybody can launch an application with this same certificate, so is not really secure, but helpful when you need to expose your app with HTTPS while developing or testing (e.g. HTML5 apps in Android that are loaded with Webview).