We have an internal facing application load balancer in AWS VPC. This is being accessed by a web app running in a public subnet. The web app is behind a custom domain url and it uses SSL certificate for security.Since, the API load balancer is not applied with SSL, communication from web app to API LB is failing.
Is it possible to get a SSL certificate for an internal facing load balancer in AWS?
Yes this is entirely possible using the AWS ACM service, there are two options, you can use Amazon's public service to generate certs but I assume that is not what you want to do here. So you can alternatively create a Private CA through this service and distribute your certificates from there which can then be placed on Loadbalancers etc. You will most likely want to look at these pages:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/acm/latest/userguide/acm-overview.html
https://aws.amazon.com/certificate-manager/
Have a read first before diving right in but it's a pretty nifty feature for this sort of thing, once the CA is setup then creating certs is so fast and instantly attachable to resources.
Related
If I create a new AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB) using HTTP, then AWS will create a load balancer with a randomly assigned domain name. Why can't AWS do the same thing when I create a new ALB using HTTPS? Instead, when creating a new ALB using HTTPS, AWS requires me to provide a custom domain name and custom certs.
The reason is that for valid public SSL certificate you require your own domain that you control. You can't register the certificate for the default domain provided by AWS for ALB because this is not your domain.
Having SSL certs is a lot of work, including managing its registration and renewals. I guess AWS does not want to do that, though they provide SSL for CloudFront AWS-provided default domains.
great question...
With many other aws tools like Amplify you will get a working https address on random aws domain, without the need to upload a certificate to a custom domain.
here They force me to use a certificate, which forces me to use aa custom domain and not the random autogenerated aws https address.
As per the docs - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/latest/application/create-https-listener.html
To use an HTTPS listener, you must deploy at least one SSL/TLS server
certificate on your load balancer. The load balancer uses a server
certificate to terminate the front-end connection and then decrypt
requests from clients before sending them to the targets.
The load balancer requires X.509 certificates (SSL/TLS server
certificates). Certificates are a digital form of identification
issued by a certificate authority (CA). A certificate contains
identification information, a validity period, a public key, a serial
number, and the digital signature of the issuer.
When you create a certificate for use with your load balancer, you must specify a domain name.
You could use Amazon's ACM to provision your certs. You will only be charged for the application as mentioned in the docs below - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/acm/latest/userguide/acm-billing.html
I have a VueJS front-end application running on S3 being served as a static website.
I have a NodeJS (behind an nginx reverse proxy, plus a few other services) backend application running on an EC2 instance that the VueJS app talks to (over http currently).
I have a domain successfully pointed at the VueJS app (S3 bucket) with the configured SSL certificates using Route53 / CloudFront / ACM.
However, now the VueJS app will not communicate with the EC2 instance backend as it is still using HTTP which is now not allowed.
So what is the best way to configure this? I can't run certbot on the ec2 instance and generate an SSL certificate for my domain as there are certificates already being used for the S3 bucket.
Should I just create a self-signed certificate?
Can I create another certificate for a subdomain perhaps (api.example.com say) and set up DNS record for that to point to my EC2 instance IP address?
How is this usually done, what is best practice?
So a self-sign cert wont work, it wont pass validation as there is no known CA behind it ( Certificate authority) I mean you can install it but the browser is going to complain..
Im not sure I understand why you cant use certbot.. s3 / ec2 are two seperate services so I'm a bit confused here?
You can use letencrypt to generate a cert for the server and have it installed as well but if you have clusters you may be better served by installing it on the actual ALB, however this does not ensure end-to-end if the cert is not installed on all backend systems, (that would require installing the cert on all systems in the cluster) You requirements will dictate this really.
If you are unable to generate a cert with letsencrypt you can get an SSL from ssls.com and just installed the PEM or CRT on the server / load balancer too though.
Usually you create some subdomain like you said for your api and create a certificate for that subdomain. On AWS in particular, you can use an elastic load balancer and use ACM /Route53 with that for ease of certificate management, but that does carry costs of the load balancer.
Alternative is to just put an API gateway in front of your EC2 instance as a reverse proxy, which will carry some costs, but maybe not as much depending on traffic volume.
We have developed web api using .net core 3.0 along with swagger. And, for testing purpose we have deployed this api on aws on EC2 instance using EBS. However, while deploying we have noticed that by default it takes only http, but we to expose the api using https.
So, for the same we have created self signed certificate on aws virtual machine and tried to configure to the hosted API and added bindings to Https by selecting the certificate. Our aws vm using IIS 10.
However, after doing this out api is stopped working and it gives lot of errors. We have tried to add the certificate in Certificate manager and after that modifying the load balancer also. But it doesn't seems to be working at all.
So, can anyone what exactly we are missing here? What are correct steps needs to be taken to configure self signed certificate to AWS deployment.
Thanks for the help !
What I've typically done is put the SSL certificate on the load balancer, so the path essentially becomes:
https traffic -> Load Balancer (HTTPS Port, does handshake) -> Application (HTTP Port)
So essentially the user send an https request that is encrypted up to the load balancer, but the load balancer does the handshake for us and passes the packet off via HTTP inside our VPC.
I have a node.js server I would like to deploy to AWS. My main site is example.com while the node server is on api.example.com
I am only using one EC2 instance (no load balancing) because I am only building an MVP and don't want to make things complicated.
I used Amazon Certificate Manager to register my domain name and I need to register api.example.com to also use https.
I right now have to put a CloudFront in front of my EC2 instance just so that I can use the ACM. This seems a little overkill since I don't need any of the caching benefits.
Is there any other way to do this?
You have 3 options:
Use CloudFront with SSL certificate from Amazon which doesn't bring any benefits for API that won't benefit from caching
Use Elastic Load Balancer with SSL certificate from Amazon. Load balancer will mantain HTTPS connection with client and communicate via HTTP with your EC2 server. You can follow this tutorial https://hackernoon.com/getting-a-free-ssl-certificate-on-aws-a-how-to-guide-6ef29e576d22
Or you can set up your certificate at EC2 instance directly. Here is how to do this with Nginx for example https://www.digicert.com/csr-ssl-installation/nginx-openssl.htm
EDIT: I have just realized that you could probably also use AWS API Gateway to point to your EC2 server API GateWay to server in ec2
I'm currently working on upgrading my company's application infrastructure.
We started off with having the basic infrastructure - One EC2 instance which is our web server linked to RDS, MySQL database.
The new infrastructure requires a VPC with 2 Public Subnets with EC2 instances and 2 Private subnets for the DB.
So, here's what I did, I created an image from the existing EC2 instance which has SSL certificate installed in it and it matches with the domain name.
From that image, I launched 2 new AMI and added a load balancer. Now the whole infra has been set up but here's the issue now - after pointing the load balancer's DNS to to the mobile app (via API), there's an error that's coming up,
javax.net.ssl.SSLException: hostname in certificate didn't match: != OR OR
03-10 13:41:23.641 29743-30234/example.hr W/System.err: at org.apache.http.conn.ssl.AbstractVerifier.verify(AbstractVerifier.java:190)
03-10 13:41:23.641 29743-30234/example.hr W/System.err: at org.apache.http.conn.ssl.BrowserCompatHostnameVerifier.verify(BrowserCompatHostnameVerifier.java:59)
From what I understand is that I'll have to add the load balancer DNS to the root domain (can be done but we cant put down the existing server). Will that work? I can do it but it will take a while for the domain service provider to add it as a CNAME record (Since it is a .hr domain, it's controlled and some records can't be added easily. It will take more than a day for it to be done)
Secondly, if I were to add an SSL cert on the load balancer's level, will it create conflicts with the SSL cert on instance level?
I'm also looking at getting a new domain and to configure on an instance level, will be a nuisance. Is there an alternative to this?
Terminating secure connections at the load balancer and using HTTP on the backend may be sufficient for your application. However, if you are developing an application that needs to comply with strict external regulations(EX: HIPPA Cert), you may be required to secure all network connections.
ELB does SSL Offloading/Termination. The load balancer uses the certificate to terminate the connection and then decrypt requests from clients before sending them to the instances and then the instance can use the self-signed certificates.
Ref:
Elastic Load Balancer SSL Support Options
Classic ELB HTTPS Listeners