I am moving my site from a tomcat only instance to an apache httd/ apache tomcat setup. I'm trying to set up the ssl with mod_ssl on apache httpd. But I don't know how to convert my tomcat keystoreFile/keystorePass to the apache httpd SSLCertificateFile/SSLCertificateKeyFile format. I am pouring over the openssl man pages with no luck. I am running the site on Fedora 13. Any suggestions?
Apache – How to move the SSL cert from Tomcat to Apache
apachekeystoreopensslssltomcat
Related Solutions
You need to add the certificate for App2 to the truststore file of the used JVM located at %JAVA_HOME%\lib\security\cacerts
.
First you can check if your certificate is already in the truststore by running the following command:
keytool -list -keystore "%JAVA_HOME%/jre/lib/security/cacerts"
(you don't need to provide a password)
If your certificate is missing, you can get it by downloading it with your browser and add it to the truststore with the following command:
keytool -import -noprompt -trustcacerts -alias <AliasName> -file <certificate> -keystore <KeystoreFile> -storepass <Password>
Example:
keytool -import -noprompt -trustcacerts -alias myFancyAlias -file /path/to/my/cert/myCert.cer -keystore /path/to/my/jdk/jre/lib/security/cacerts/keystore.jks -storepass changeit
After import you can run the first command again to check if your certificate was added.
Sun/Oracle information can be found here.
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 theSSLSession
when using the JSSE connector directly). You may have to configure the matching path in Httpd to request the client-certificate.
Best Answer
Use the Java
keytool -importkeystore
utility to convert the "JKS" format key store file to a standard "PKCS #12" format. Then use OpenSSL to convert the PKCS #12 file to whatever format you require. You can see full details in this answer to a duplicate question.