I'm creating a SOA system, where server A connects to server B via SSL/TLS.
I could use an API token to ensure A is who they say they are. But since I'm using TLS, and server A has a Verisign issued X.509 certificate that says who they are, it seems to make sense to use the certificate.
So the high-level authentication workflow would be:
A connects to B by TLS
B checks checks A's certificate
B drops A if the cert is invalid OR if the cert is for any other party than A
I'd like to do this at outside of the application, at the lowest level of the network stack possible. Possibly by an Apache config directive that would say something like:
DropUnlessX509CertificateNameMatches XXXXXXXXX
?
Are there any drawbacks to this vs API token authentication?
Related
I have set up Mutual TLS authentication for my API Gateway.
I then placed my client certificate in the truststore. The file contains the client certificate, intermediate and root certificates (private CA).
When accessing the API Gateway with a browser (Chrome on Windows), browser asks me to provide client certificate. I select the same certificate as I have placed in the trust store.
API Gateway reports the following in the browser:
{"message":"Invalid client certificate chain. More than one client certificate passed"}
UPDATE: I have also tried placing only intermediate and root certs in the trust store. Same error.
UPDATE 2: The same error is also reported when accessing the API with C# code (WebClient) loading the cert from Windows cert store or from disc (pfx file).
If your trust store doesn't contain all the intermediate CA certs, then the client has to send a multi-cert chain. The TLS handshake will work fine, but somewhere there is an explicit check that disallows multi-cert chains. The status code is 400, not 403(!), and you get the "More than one client certificate passed" error.
However, if you're willing to put all the intermediate CA in the API gateway trust store, then the server should not ask the client to send intermediate certs. The client should only send one cert in this case, and API gateway should work.
So something is going wrong when API gateway matches the initial client cert against the trust store, and it's not finding the intermediate. I would check these things:
Make sure you use a specific version ID with the S3 link to the trust store. Otherwise it's hard to tell which version it's actually using, because the API gateway will not automatically pick up a new version as soon as you add one to S3. Maybe you're not using the trust store you think you are.
Your trust store should only include CA certs -- the root cert and intermediates. You said you put the client cert in there, so maybe that's causing an issue. Try taking it out.
Using WSO2 APIM 2.6.0 seems the primary keystore certificate is used for multiple purposes
service (nio-https) SSL - that can be easily changed
signing a JWT token to the API Gateway backend service
thrift SSL endpoint for the Traffic Manager (port 9711)
The issue I have is that in a distributed setup a separate gateway should reach the TM endpoint and the hostname needs to be trusted. So - in theory I can create a self-signed certificate with a new hostname, however a new keypair/certificate will break existing backend validating the JWT token.
In theory I may just create a different self-signed certificate with the same public key, it may be more complex to manage in long run (I don't want to promote this practice).
Question: Is there a way to configure either the JWT signing certificate or the thrift SSL certificate separately? Or disable hostname validation for the throttling service (port 9711)?
(I'm not sure we want to allow disabling the hostname validation globally)
Since you have a distributed setup, this can be achieved easily.
You need to change the certificate in the gateways so that they use that keystore for the TM connection.
Keep the KM keystore as it is so that JWT is signed using the same old keystore.
We have a Webservice Application running on Tomcat.
This is SSL secured. We need to share our public key to every client trying to access our web services. Is it possible to disable the trust certificate verification ?
By default, all TLS clients should verify the servers to which they are connecting. Any other default behavior would be dangerous.
The client is the party performing the verification in a one-way TLS handshake (that is, when there is no client-authentication being performed where the client also presents a certificate to the server).
There are only two ways to avoid distributing your server's certificate to all possible clients:
Get your server's certificate signed by a trusted Certificate Authority (CA)
Modify all possible clients to ignore any problems with your certificate (such as not trusting it)
These days, with free domain certificates available from e.g. Let's Encrypt, it's silly not to use a certificate signed by a legitimate CA.
I have set up a basic API using AWS API Gateway and I would like to link my endpoints to a service I have running on an EC2 instance (using the "HTTP Proxy" integration type). I have read that in order to lock down my EC2 server from only accepting traffic from the API Gateway, I basically have one of two options:
Stick the EC2 instance behind VPC and use Lambda functions (instead of HTTP proxy) that have VPC permissions to act as a "pass through" for the API requests
Create a Client Certificate within API Gateway, make my backend requests using that cert, and verify the cert on the EC2 instance.
I would like to employ a variation of #2 and instead of verifying the cert on the EC2 service instance itself, I would like to instead do that verification on another instance running Haproxy. I have set up a second EC2 instance with Haproxy and have that pointed at my other instance as the backend. I have locked down my service instance so it will only take requests from the Haproxy instance. That is all working. What I have been struggling to figure out is how to verify the AWS Gateway Client Certificate (that I have generated) on the Haproxy machine. I have done tons of googling and there is surprisingly zero information on how to do this exact thing. A couple questions:
Everything I have read seems to suggest that I need to generate SSL server certs on my Haproxy machine and use those in the config. Do I have to do this, or can I verify the AWS client cert without generating any additional certs?
The reading I have done suggests I would need to generate a CA and then use that CA to generate both the server and client certs. If I do in fact need to generate server certs (on the Haproxy machine), how can I generate them if I don't have access to the CA that amazon used to create the gateway client cert? I only have access to the client cert itself, from what I can tell.
Any help here?
SOLUTION UPDATE
First, I had to upgrade my version of HAproxy to v1.5.14 so I could get the SSL capabilities
I originally attempted to generate an official cert with letsencrypt. While I was able to get the API gateway working with this cert, I was not able to generate a letsencrypt cert on the HAproxy machine that the API gateway would accept. The issue surfaced as an "Internal server error" response from the API gateway and as "General SSLEngine problem" in the detailed CloudWatch logs.
I then purchased a wildcard certificate from Gandi, and tried this on the HAproxy machine, but initially ran into the exact same problem. However, I was able to determine that the structure of my SSL cert was not what the API gateway wanted. I googled and found the Gandi chain here:
https://www.gandi.net/static/CAs/GandiStandardSSLCA2.pem
Then I structured my SSL file as follows:
-----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY-----
# private key I generated locally...
-----END PRIVATE KEY-----
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
# cert from gandi...
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
# two certs from file in the above link
I saved out this new PEM file (as haproxy.pem) and used it in my HAproxy frontend bind statement, like so:
bind :443 ssl crt haproxy.pem verify required ca-file api-gw-cert.pem
The api-gw-cert.pem in the above bind statement is a file that contains a client cert that I generated in the API gateway console. Now, the HAproxy machine properly blocks any traffic coming from anywhere but the gateway.
The reading I have done suggests I would need to generate a CA and then use that CA to generate both the server and client certs.
That's one way to do it, but it is not applicable in this case.
Your HAProxy needs to be configured with a working SSL certificate signed by a trusted CA -- not the one that signed the client certificate, and not one you create. It needs to be a certificate signed by a public, trusted CA whose root certificates are in the trust store of the back-end systems at API Gateway... which should be essentially the same as what your web browser trusts, but may be a subset.
Just as your web browser will not speak SSL to a server sporting a self-signed certificate without throwing a warning that you have to bypass, the back-end of API Gateway won't negotiate with an untrusted certificate (and there's no bypass).
Suffice it to say, you need to get API Gateway talking to your HAProxy over TLS before trying to get it to use a client cert, because otherwise you are introducing too many unknowns. Note also that you can't use an Amazon Certificate Manager cert for this, because those certs only work with CloudFront and ELB, neither of which will support client certs directly.
Once the HAProxy is working with API Gateway, you need then to configure it to authenticate the client.
You need ssl and verify required in your bind statement, but you can't verify an SSL client cert without something to verify it against.
I only have access to the client cert itself, from what I can tell.
And that's all you need.
bind ... ssl ... verify required ca-file /etc/haproxy/api-gw-cert.pem.
SSL certs are essentially a trust hierarchy. The trust at the top of the tree is explicit. Normally, the CA is explicitly trusted and anything it has signed is implicitly trusted. The CA "vouches for" the certificates it signs... and for certificates it signs with the CA attribute set, which can also sign certificates under them, extending that implicit trust.
In this case, though, you simply put the client certificate in as the CA file, and then the client certificate "vouches for"... itself. A client presenting the identical certificate is trusted, and anybody else is disconnected. Having just the certificate is not enough for a client to talk to your proxy, of course -- the client also needs the matching private key, which API Gateway has.
So, consider this two separate requirements. Get API Gateway talking to your proxy over TLS first... and after that, authenticating against the client certificate is actually the easier part.
I think you are mixing up server certs and client certs. In this instance API Gateway is the client, and HAProxy is the server. You want HAProxy to verify the client cert sent by API Gateway. API Gateway will generate the certificate for you, you just need to configure HAProxy to verify that certificate is present in every request it processes.
I'm guessing you might be looking at this tutorial where they are telling you to generate the client cert, and then configure HAProxy to verify that cert. The "generate the cert" part of that tutorial can be skipped since API Gateway is generating the cert for you.
You just need to click the "Generate" button in API Gateway, then copy/paste the contents of the certificate it presents you and save that as a .pem file on the HAProxy server. Now I'm not a big HAProxy user, but I think taking the example from that tutorial your HAProxy config would look something like:
bind 192.168.10.1:443 ssl crt ./server.pem verify required
I have created a Wcf service with SAML implementation. I am using federation binding for the same. From my client application I'm able to access the services hosted on my WCF web service easily when I'm running both client and host service on same machine. I have used certificates for authentication(SAML implementation).
For your information I have custom module at client side which acts as a identity provider. The host service just has some functions which are exposed using wsfederationbinding.
Now the problem is that when I'm running my WCF service host at a different system and client application(consumer with identity provider) on a different system, I`m getting the following error message
MessageSecurityException: The EncryptedKey clause was not wrapped with the required encryption token 'System.IdentityModel.Tokens.X509SecurityToken'.
Note:I feel there is a something mismatch happening interms of certificates between client and host service.
I have resolved the above problem, actually the root cause for the above error was certificate mismatch.
I read at one of the SAML forum regarding the SAML certificate authentication procedure,which says
The token is encrypted using the Public certificate at client side.
At the server side(Webservice Host in my case) the received token is decrypted using the private key of the certificate.
So,in my case the certificates were different at client side compared to the one's at server side.
Resolution :
Just export the certificates from server side(Webservice host in my case) and import the same at client side.
Note: There exist 2 certificates,client certificate and server certificate at both sides(client side and server side).
so in reality,when a client wants to access the host web service(dynamically), just like downloading apps,we need to create both certificates at service side and deploy those certificates to client upon activation of the client app.this way certificates will be in sync.