We have a website hosted on AWS and the requests going to ALB and then ec2 instance.We have configured the ALB with ssl certificate and hence ssl termination happens at ALB.
In the chrome dev console network tab when we load our website, We could see that the below figures
Initial connection 992.35 ms
SSL 669.96 ms
So is this latency purely because of where the client is and the ALB itself as the application which is on the EC2 instance itself is not involved in the connection setup.
I understand that the alb has to make a connection to the application as well.Atleast the ssl part is purely because of ALB ? Can we improve this from our end ?
What else could we do here given ALB is doing the ssl termination ?
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So I have a flask web application. I need to have this be HTTPS only. So I'm pretty lost here:
Application Load Balancer -> Target Group -> EC2 Instance (:443) -> ??? -> Flask
So originally I had the following in my http stack:
nginx -> gunicorn -> Flask
That worked for http. And it makes sense how to set up a target group to point to the exposed port of nginx in http. You just provide the port. easy.
However where I am completely lost is when you add HTTPS into the equation. You have AWS provide you with the certificate itself through ACM (Aws certificate manager). However, very specifically AWS Certificate Manager does not allow the created certificates to be exported. So you cannot provide nginx with the certificate, but to use https (443) on nginx you have to provide the ssl_certificate.crt on the server block itself...
So from reading it seems like you don't need nginx... do I need gunicorn? Do I just run flask? If so how does it 'expose' port :443?
I am truly at a loss at how to connect Flask to the target group. Can any one point me to the correct directon? I've exhausted all googling options.
Your confusion is in thinking you need SSL between the load balancer and the Flask application. You can terminate SSL at the load balancer. This will provide SSL between any clients like web browsers and your AWS infrastructure, and you will only have non-SSL traffic inside your virtual private network, between the load balancer and the EC2 instance.
Create the SSL certificate in AWS ACM, and attach it to a listener on the Application Load Balancer. Have both listeners in your load balancer (the port 80 listener without SSL, and the port 443 listener with SSL) forward to the target group. Have the target group connect to your EC2 instance over port 80, or 8080 or 5000 or whatever port you have Flask running on. I think Flask defaults to port 5000?
If you are under some sort of requirements for end-to-end encryption that requires you to setup SSL between the load balancer and the EC2 instance, like some regulatory requirements, then you would need to go back to using Nginx and either purchase an SSL certificate somewhere, or setup a free Let's Encrypt certificate, that you could use with Nginx.
I was using an EC2 instance of AWS and deploy my app on root through HTTP.
Now I migrated to HTTPs but the app does not load correctly. But I cant see any errors on chrome developers tools. The only thing I noticed different is that there is a lot of connections (350) made to the root that is where I deployed the app. I suspect is because the change of https. To made my app HTTPs I am using a load balancer of AWS and the aws certificate manager. Sorry for my english.
Image 1
when you add SSL certificates to the Application Load Balancer, the encryption and decryption of the request is taken care of by the ALB. Read more about this here. This means that your app can operate normally and should not be concerned with the request policy.
You can create a target group and point both HTTP (port 80) and HTTPS (port 443) traffic to the same target group.
Coming to your question. It seems like you are having difficulty in connecting to the ALB on port 443 (HTTPS). If your application is working as expected on port 80 (HTTP) follow this checklist to zero down on your problem:
Make sure that the security group of the ALB allows port 443 to your users or to the world
Check if the ALB has a listener configured on port 443. Read more about this in the docs here
Check if this listener points to the application target group.
As a last step, if you are using a domain name, make sure that it is pointing to the ALB and not the origin servers (EC2 in this case)
If you would like to get better understanding of how the request flows from the users instance to your application server, I've answered a simmilar question here.
I Created an EC2 instance that is running perfectly over http.but when i try to replace http to https i got this printed on the browser This site can’t provide a secure connection. the security group that is associated to this instance is configured to allow requests from both HTTP and HTTPS as in the attached image:
You are trying to run https over a port that has been configured for HTTP.
There are multiple options to get around this:
Setup a proxy on your local server, such as Nginx. Setup certbot to generate your SSL and then serve this from your proxy.
Create an ELB in front of your server, generate a certificate in ACM and add your server as a target (running http) to the ELB. Use the load balancer for SSL termination.
Create a CloudFront distribution in front of your server, generate a certificate in ACM and forward traffic to your server as the origin (running http).
How do I verify if I have secured end to end encryption on my AWS FARGATE container? Have mentioned the approach below :
Application Load balancer listening on 443. Uses a certificate from AWS Certificate Manager.
Target group's protocol is HTTPS on port 8443. The health check protocol is HTTPS too.
Spring boot application's docker image running on the container, host/container port is 8443. Have the same certificate in the classpath of the application in a PKCS12 file (has the certificate and private key in it).
Docker image's and application's port is 8443.
It says a secure connection when I hit the application URL. I understand SSL offloading happens at the load balancer level in ALB.
But does the above approach mean an end to end encryption has been achieved? And how do I verify that?
I understand SSL offloading happens at the load balancer level in ALB
SSL offloading is an option with an ALB, if you have target groups using HTTP protocol instead of HTTPS. Offloading implies you're terminating SSL at the load balancer, then using http between the ALB and the target, which isn't what's happening for you.
But does the above approach mean an end to end encryption has been achieved?
If you're using an HTTPS target group, like you are doing, you ought to have end to end encryption. You've got the right idea to verify though, so you can be sure.
And how do I verify that?
You can ensure the traffic to your ALB is using SSL by enabling access logs. You're also seeing SSL in your browser.
You can test the targets are receiving SSL traffic by running something like tcpdump or ssldump (or both!) on your target web server.
I have a very private problem, I have a Java EE application (WildFly 10), running on the infrastructure of Amazon, well.
This application has an SSL certificate acquired of a specific domain ("www.xxx.com"), which has been properly installed on Amazon's Application Load Balancer (ALB), which retains requests and forwards securely to the application server an EC2, so far everything great.
But when we try to instantiate in the pages a "client" "WebSocket" in JavaScript it even presents "MixedContent" errors when used via unsecured WebSocket (WS), so that's fine because it is a browser security requirement:
ws = new WebSocket("ws://<ip-address>:8080/web-socket");
So i use a secure WebSocket (WSS) to make the connection, then under the IP and then presented the error that the IP was not secure because it had not been certified:
ws = new WebSocket("wss://<ip-address>:8443/web-socket");
So I installed the SSL certificate of the domain on the WildFly 10 server, but even then the error was still presented because the SSL certificate was purchased for the domain, not for the IP I'm trying to connect.
If i try to connect Secure WebSocket (WSS) through the secure domain, the same connects, but the Amazon ALB always drops it for inactivity time, and even if the value is too high, the Time to Live (TTL) over time, it shows performance loss over time, I believe by pooling TCP connections.
ws = new WebSocket("wss://www.xxx.com.br:8443/web-socket");
A possible solution would be to buy an SSL certificate that instead of registering a domain, would be registered under the IP of the server, the same would be installed on the server to allow this secure connection between Secure WebSocket and Secure Application, what opinion or experience you?