Glassfish 3.1.2.2 behind an SSL terminating load balancer - ssl

The organisation I'm working for is currently running an application on Glassfish 3.1.2.2 behind a hardware (same issue with software/cloud) load balancer that is also in charge of SSL termination. We are currently having issues with Glassfish not knowing that it is behind an SSL connection and therefor generating certain things incorrectly. Specifically the following:
session cookies are not flagged as secure
redirects generated from Glassfish are done as http:// instead of https://
request.isSecure() is not returning the correct value
request.getScheme() is not returning the correct value
In theory we could rewrite all of these things in the load balancer, but on previous projects using Tomcat and have been able to solve all of them at the container level.
In Tomcat I can just set the secure flag and the scheme value on the HTTP connector definition and everything is good to go. But I can't seem to find equivalents on Glassfish.
Anyone have any ides?

If your load balancer provides X-Forwarded-Proto header you can try to use scheme-mapping attribute in the http definition of your domain.xml:
<http default-virtual-server="server"
max-connections="100"
scheme-mapping="X-Forwarded-Proto">...
For example nginx can be configured to provide this header very easily:
location / {
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto https;
proxy_pass http://glassfish;
}
Looks like glassfish has some known issues related to scheme-mapping support though.

Related

How to override scheme and is_ssl in apache HTTP Server for mod_proxy_ajp

We are running Tomcat 7 behind a load balancer that works also as SSL terminator, and an Apache HTTP Server 2.4. The Apache connects to the Tomcat via mod_proxy_ajp.
For the application it is important that Tomcat is aware that the request is coming in via HTTPS and is thus secure. As e.g. this article recommends, it is common to configure this on the Tomcat's Connector using the attributes secure="true" and possibly scheme="https" proxyPort="443". While this works, it is inconvenient since we are using HTTP for some purposes as well, and thus we would need to set up two Tomcat connectors for this purpose. And it has a smell, since this way we basically tell Tomcat to override the wrong information it gets from the Apache HTTP Server that the request is HTTPS instead of HTTP, instead of telling the Apache that it should send the correct information on the protocol and secure status.
So my question: is it somehow possible to configure the Apache HTTP Server itself that it passes the correct information via the AJP protocol: that the request is received via HTTPS and is secure? The problem is that it doesn't know it's HTTPS, since there is a SSL terminator before it and the requests arrives via HTTP, as far as it is concerned. Can I tell the Apache somehow that it's actually HTTPS?
A partial solution seems to be to set the protocol on a ServerName directive in the virtual host in the Apache HTTP server:
ServerName https://whatever
This way any Location: headers in redirects seem to be rewritten to https in the Apache, but the Tomcat is still passed the wrong information via AJP.
I always thought that AJP transfers this information automagically - but I'm not using mod_proxy_ajp, rather mod_jk. It's one of the reasons why I much prefer AJP over HTTP (and proxying).
Might be worth to change the module/connection

Connection Partially Encrypted in Firefox :SSL

I have uploaded my SSL certificates to IAM purchased from Comodo and evrything looks fine in chrome and opera. But mozilla is giving an error: "Connection Partially encrypted". I am not able gauge why this is happening.
Link : https://www.advisorcircuit.com/
Please tell me what is the possible culprit for this?
and also i want to know , how can i redirect my users to HTTPS ebven if they type http as even if i type http the website loads and opens.
I am using AWS t2.medium instance. So is there any configuration i need to do in my console??
Redirection:
You have a few options:
Block HTTP traffic, only allow HTTPS on the Security Group level ( Not the nicest solution.
Use an Elastic Load balancer, Listening only on HTTPS port. ( Same as above)
The webserver ( most of them like Tomcat, IIS, etc) supports a redirection, so it sends back "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently", then the client browser does the call again on HTTPS.
If you use Elastic Load Balancer with SSL termination ( which is a good practice, less load on your server, easier setup of the SSL Certificate). Then all your traffic inside your VPC goes on port 80. In this case you need to setup your webserver to redirect differently. Instead of the incoming port, the trigger for the redirection should be the based on the "X-Forwarded-Proto" header value, which is the original protocol what the client is using.
For production environment the last setup is an AWS Best practice. ( Of course there are also other solutions)
Your site is running Apache/2.2.29. You can redirect your virtual host traffic from 80->443 in Apache itself. That way if someone goes to http://www.yourdomain.com then get redirected to https://www.yourdomain.com
ServerFault has an post explaining how to use Apache mod_rewrite to accomplish this
https://serverfault.com/a/554183/280448
Also you need to adjust the SSL cipher suites that your site accepts. Your ELB has an option to change cipher suites and you can deselect some there. The two you definitely want deselected are RC4 and SSL3.
Here's the full report if you want to make more changes
https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.advisorcircuit.com&s=52.7.154.196&latest

Proxy Protocol on Elastic Load Balancing non-terminated SSL connection

For reasons we're not going to change, our application needs to handle the SSL connection, and not the ELB. The goal of using the Proxy Protocol is to get the client's IP address over an SSL connection.
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/07/elastic-load-balancing-adds-support-for-proxy-protocol.html?ref_=9 indicates "Alternatively, you can use it if you are sending HTTPS requests and do not want to terminate the SSL connection on the load balancer. For more information, please visit the Elastic Load Balancing Guide."
Unfortunately, it appears the guide that's linked to doesn't actually elaborate on this, and the basic documentation for the Proxy Protocol ( http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ElasticLoadBalancing/latest/DeveloperGuide/enable-proxy-protocol.html ) fails in our environment when configured as described.
Does anyone have steps or a link for this?
The proxy protocol (version 1) injects a single line into the data stream at the beginning of the connection, before SSL is negotiated by your server. You don't get this information "over" an SSL connection; you get the information prior to SSL handshaking. Your server has to implement this capability and specifically be configured so that it can accept and understand it. For an IPv4 connection, it looks like this:
PROXY TCP4 source-ip dest-ip source-port dest-port\r\n
The standard for the protocol is here:
http://haproxy.1wt.eu/download/1.5/doc/proxy-protocol.txt
Additional info in the ELB docs here:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ElasticLoadBalancing/latest/DeveloperGuide/TerminologyandKeyConcepts.html#proxy-protocol
Regarding Apache support, at least at the time AWS announced support for the proxy protocol...
“neither Apache nor Nginx currently support the Proxy Protocol header inserted by the ELB”
— http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/07/elastic-load-balancing-adds-support-for-proxy-protocol.html?ref_=9
That is subject to change, of course, but I didn't successfully google for any Apache support of the proxy protocol. Of course, since Apache is open source, you could presumably hack it in there, though I am unfamiliar with the Apache source code.
Realizing that you don't want to change what you're doing now, I still would suggest that depending on your motivation for not wanting to change, there may still be a relatively simple solution. It's a change, but not involving SSL on ELB. What about running HAProxy behind ELB to terminate the SSL in front of Apache? Since HAProxy 1.5 can terminate SSL and appears to be able to translate the proxy protocol string from ELB into an X-Forwarded-For header, as well as generate X-SSL headers to give your application information about the client's SSL cert (perhaps that's your motivation for terminating SSL at the app server instead of on the ELB?) ... so this might be an alternative.
Otherwise, I don't have suggestions unless Apache implements support in the future, or we can find some documentation to indicate that they already have.
For the newer Network Load Balancers which allow your application servers to terminate the TLS connections, you can still get the real IP addresses of your clients and avoid all the work of configuring proxy protocol on the ELBs and in the web server config by simply configuring the target groups to use the servers' instance ids rather than their IP addresses. Regardless of which web server you use, the real IPs of the clients will show up in the logs with no translation needed.
Just to follow up on Michael - sqlbot's answer discussing the AWS support for proxy protocol on EC2 instances behind classic TCP elastic load balancers, the Apache module to use that implements the proxy protocol is mod_remoteip. Enabling it and updating the configuration properly will correct the problem of logging IP addresses of users rather than the elastic load balancer's IPs.
To enable proxy protocol on the elastic load balancer you could use these aws cli commands described in the aws documentation:
aws elb create-load-balancer-policy --load-balancer-name my-elb-name --policy-name my-elb-name-ProxyProtocol-policy --policy-type-name ProxyProtocolPolicyType --policy-attributes AttributeName=ProxyProtocol,AttributeValue=true
aws elb set-load-balancer-policies-for-backend-server --load-balancer-name my-elb-name --instance-port 443 --policy-names my-elb-name-ProxyProtocol-policy
aws elb set-load-balancer-policies-for-backend-server --load-balancer-name my-elb-name --instance-port 80 --policy-names my-elb-name-ProxyProtocol-policy
To enable use of proxy protocol in apache, in a server-wide or VirtualHost context, follow the mod_remoteip documentation such as below:
<IfModule mod_remoteip.c>
RemoteIPProxyProtocol On
RemoteIPHeader X-Forwarded-For
# The IPs or IP range of your ELB:
RemoteIPInternalProxy 192.168.1.0/24
# The IPs of hosts that may need to connect directly to the web server, bypassing the ELB (if applicable):
RemoteIPProxyProtocolExceptions 127.0.0.1
</IfModule>
You'll need to update the LogFormat wherever you have those defined (e.g. httpd.conf) to use %a rather than %h else the load balancer IP addresses will still appear.

How to get tomcat to send redirects as https urls when apache handles ssl

I'm a bit out of my depth here and nothing I have found quite addresses my problem. Si any and all suggestions are most welcome.
I've got tomcat6 running on CentOS 6.5 hidden behind an apache server (v2.2.15) and I am using Apache's mod_proxy to expose the tomcat webapps, which are running on port 8080. The tomcat hosts one production application and several development applications. On the apache side, both a Drupal site and the aforementioned tomcat production application are on the same domain and, thanks to rewrite rules, all requests to this domain are changed to https. The development sites are reached via subdomains and do not get re-written as https requests.
For the most part, this arrangement works fine. But parts of the tomcat apps are AJAX (calling a Java Struts 1.2 backend). Most of those requests are handled OK. But a few AJAX requests result in redirects (i.e., forward.setRedirect(true)) and that redirect is http (I guess because the container itself is not secure). As a result, I run into cross site scripting issues. I imagine I can use CORS headers to avoid the problem. But that seems like a hack. Is there a relatively painless way I can use to have tomcat send redirects back as https without making tomcat handle ssl directly?
Cris
You could configure the RemoteIpValve in Tomcat:
Another feature of this valve is to replace the apparent scheme
(http/https) and server port with the scheme presented by a proxy or a
load balancer via a request header (e.g. "X-Forwarded-Proto").
To configure Apache to forward the original protocol in the X-Forwarded-Proto header, add a RequestHeader directive in your Apache config, e.g.:
<VirtualHost *:443>
RequestHeader set X-Forwarded-Proto "https"
...
Note that in Tomcat 7, there is also a RemoteIpFilter.
You don't need to do anything special. It already works. Make sure you set the "redirectPort" in server.xml to Apache's HTTPS port, usually 443, and add the following to your <security-constraint> sections for resources you want secured by HTTPS:
<user-data-constraint>
<description>HTTPS</description>
<transport-guarantee>CONFIDENTIAL</transport-guarantee>
</‌​user-data-constraint>
Late to the game here but others may find this-- we had a similar setup and issue where everything worked fine until the application started using ajax posts which did redirects for the response. The fix was to use mod_header in apache to rewrite redirects using "Header edit Location"
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_headers.html
Header edit Location ^http://www.example.com/ https://www.example.com/
This went unnoticed prior to the ajax redirects because the browser has no problem doing page level redirects to http (which apache would then redirect back to https). But the ajax cross-site prevention halts at the initial http missing out on that would then be redirected to https by a subsequent request.

Apache HTTPD/mod_proxy/Tomcat and SSL with client auth

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.