I was reading about backend authentication option in AWS ELB.
What it mentions is there is a instance public key (.pem encoded) to be configured in ELB.
What I could not understand is what is this key or certificate?
Since it is optional will the traffic will still be encrypted between ELB and EC2 instances if port 443 is used.
There is no details mentioned on how to actually do this.
Basically I want end to end encryption from user to elb and elb to ec2.
Basically what this is saying is that if you what encryption in transit for the entire journey you will need to install an SSL certificate on your EC2 instance. The journey will look like the below.
client ---(HTTPS)--> load balancer ---(HTTPS)--> EC2 host
You will need to either purchase an SSL, or use a free option such as certbot on your server.
Then once you have this you will need to configure for the web server software you are running. Below are some instructions for common web servers:
Apache
Nginx
IIS
Tomcat
Ensure that your target group is configured for HTTPS port 443 traffic, to have the load balancer forward requests to HTTPS on your backend.
If the load balancer to EC2 host is not encrypted (plain HTTP) the clients traffic to load balancer will still be encrypted, but after this will be forward in HTTP.
Related
I have an ec2 instance behind Application ELB in AWS. I want to apply SSL to both ec2 instance as well as loadbalancer. For ec2 instance i have purchased ssl and installed it and it is working fine. For load balancer i will be using the free AWS ACM certificate and installing it on load balancer. Will this have any issues? i.e. installing SSL on both places ec2 and elb.
It will not have any issues but it does come with a caveat. The traffic in to the Application Load Balancer (ALB) will be encrypted and the ACM cert will be validated by the client. The traffic to the host from the ALB will also be encrypted but the certificate on the host will not be validated.
It looks like ALB Backend Authentication is on AWS's roadmap per the reference below. The reason given for it not being a priority is summarized in this quote from the AWS Engineer who wrote the first reference:
The role that server certificates play in TLS is to authenticate the server, so that it can’t be impersonated or MITM. ALBs run exclusively on our Amazon VPC network, a Software Defined Network where we encapsulate and authenticate traffic at the packet level.
The upside of this is you can use self-signed certs on your hosts to save money when using an ALB or ELB in front of them.
If you need to ensure the certificate on the host is valid you can use a Classic Elastic Load Balancer (ELB). See the reference for more details.
References
AWS ALB Validation TLS Reply
AWS ELB Configure Backend Authentication
If you use SSl/TSL at ELB, it will handle the encryption/decryption of the HTTPS connections (freeing your EC2 instance's CPU to do other work).
If you use an HTTPS/SSL connection for your back end, you can enable authentication on the back-end instance. This authentication can be used to ensure that back-end instances accept only encrypted communication, and to ensure that the back-end instance has the correct certificates.
Using SSL/TLS on both ELB and Backend can create problems since ELB HTTPS listener does not support Client-Side SSL certificates.
I have considered that you are using a 2-way SSL (Mutual or Client Authentication)
i configured an ELB for an ec2 instance such the load balancer receives data from http:80 send it to https:443 to instances. But when i entered ELB DNS url , it is not redirecting to https.
output of ELB is:
it is showing the output of port 80. can anyone please help to configure elb such that it redirects incoming port 80 traffic to port 443 to ec2 instacne.
Load balancer used to send and receive traffic from different ports from the EC2 instances attached to that Load Balancer. You cannot setup any redirect using a Load Balancer. For redirects you have to set that up using the Web Server of your EC2 instance attached to that load balancer.
Also as per the https goes either you add a SSL certificate to the EC2 instance or the ELB. But that SSL certificate will be for the domain you are going to use for your application, and you do not own the domain "amazonaws.com" so your load balancer URL will never work for https. You have get a Domain and a SSL certificate for that domain upload that SSL certificate to ELB or the EC2 instance and then point the domain to the ELB by adding a C-Name. Then your domain will work for https ://www.domain.com if you have set everything correctly in the web server.
It sounds like you want to redirect HTTP requests to HTTPS. This is more than just a port "redirect", it is also a protocol change. To properly redirect HTTP traffic to HTTPS you will need to configure your web server to do that.
I have an existing EC2 instance running Apache2 where I set https on, using let's encrypt service. Now I'd like to create an autoscaling group (with 1 to 3 of these instances) and a load balancer and I'd like to keep my https certificate.
Which is the best way to do that?
If the SSL certificate is going to be installed on each EC2 instance, then you can just setup port 443 on the load balancer as a TCP listener, and it will pass the traffic on port 443 directly to the instance, where the SSL certificate will be served.
Note that this is going to require Let's Encrypt be working on each instance that gets created. It will really be easier for you to get a new (free) certificate via the AWS ACM service, and install that on the load balancer.
If I would like to expose a web-app to external internet what steps I need to follow in aws?
Create cloudfront or static ip or route 53? Not sure what needs to
be exposed
Create WAF?
Create ELB?AWS ELB or nginx
Enforce https through webserver?
Any other requirements please point me through?
Route53 is not a requirement at all. You can use Route53 for DNS, or you can use a third-party DNS service, or you can just use a static ip (AWS Elastic IP).
WAF is not needed just for exposing an API.
ELB is only needed if you are running this on multiple servers.
You could enforce HTTPS at the web server, or you could just leave port 80 closed and only open port 443.
At an absolute minimum you just need to deploy your application to an EC2 server, open the appropriate port(s) in the Security Group, and assign the server an Elastic IP.
i am having issues setting up an EC2 load balancer, on a instance, that has multiple domains protected by SSL.
Is it possible to make the load balancer pass the HTTPS request as is, and get it decrypted at the server level? If so, how do i set that up?
I have a standard LAMP setup on a EC2.
On your Elastic Load Balancer, configure a TCP listener that listens on port 443 and forwards to port 443 on the instances. This will allow your EC2 instances to perform the SSL termination.
Note that you won't be able to use Sticky Sessions in this configuration.