Apart from the Agent, I'm not aware of any REST calls made by individual
components, but I'd need to be aware of any problems that this change
might cause.

It's not a hawkular component, but hawkular ruby client uses only REST to communicate with hawkular. The underlying rest client has support for adding explicitly the CA, if not specified it's taken from the system. Adding client certificates is also possible, but that's not necessary, imho.

There is also an option not to do the certificate check at all by passing :verify_ssl => false. This way we get the encrypted comm channel and save the trouble with adding the certificates. However, it's less secure, because it's not guaranteed that the server side is the one who it claims to be.

jk

On Thu, May 26, 2016 at 11:51 AM, Jiri Kremser <jkremser@redhat.com> wrote:

Hi,

  what about creating a default certificate that is issued by a commonly accepted root CA (at least in the modern browsers, not sure about JVM if there is something similar). On the internets there is a service https://letsencrypt.org .I haven't tried yet, but it has also some API for doing it automatically, so we can even go further. What I've tried is the https://www.startssl.com and it worked perfectly, I can see the green https in the chrome :] Both services are for free, but afaik, don't allow to issue the "star" certificate, but for the dev purposes all we need is the cert for the localhost, right?

As for the production, we may provide some script + docs how to generate the cert in the https://letsencrypt.org

my 2c

jk

On Wed, May 25, 2016 at 3:46 PM, Juraci Paixão Kröhling <jpkroehling@redhat.com> wrote:

On 25.05.2016 15:16, John Mazzitelli wrote:
>> My next step is to change the agent to accept certs on our keystore.
>
> If everything works as I am expecting it to work, you should just need to configure the agent's storage adapter to use the WildFly security realm where the keystore is defined, and it should "just work." But then again, its been a while since I tested the agent using secure comm to the server, but that is how I got it to work last time.
>
> See http://www.hawkular.org/docs/user/secure-comm.html

Cool ! That would work for the local agent, which is the scenario I was
planning on working on. For remote agents, we should *not* do this, as
the keystore includes the private key for the cert, which should be
known only to the server. But for the remote agent, I expect the server
to use a proper certificate chain.

>> Related question: are we even allowed to ship such keystores?
>
> It is how RHQ does it :-)

That's good to know, thanks!

>> - As mentioned in the previous point, the cert is self-signed. So, you
>> might need to add "-k" to curl to bypass the cert verification.
>> - Authentication with client cert is not yet available.
>
>
> I do not know how to tell WildFly in its security-realm to do this same kind of bypass... did you look into that? Because the agent will need to be told about doing this bypass, too. The way I worked around it was I actually put my self-signed cert into my JVM's truststore (which isn't something I think we want to ask people to do).

It depends on the HTTP client you are using. In the "production"
scenarios, no change is needed, as the cert would probably have a valid
chain.

For dev scenarios, or scenarios where the cert is issued by an unknown
root CA (like internal certificates), the common practice is to add the
root CA to the JVM's keystore, similar to what you did. The reason is
that this cert is not trusted by any known Certificate Authority, so, an
admin would have to explicitly tell that this cert is known and is to be
trusted. The cert we will be shipping on the keystore is *not* trusted
and is intended to be used only on dev scenarios.

Another practice is to do a certificate pinning, ie, tell your HTTP
client that you know about this specific cert. The disadvantage of this
is that we'd have to keep the server and client in sync. Looking at your
instructions on secure-comm.html , this is probably what you are doing
on the agent side.

Unfortunately, there's no secure solution that I know of that would
allow us to ship something usable for our production distribution.

There was a thread some time ago on wildfly-dev about auto generating
certificates on the first boot. I believe this was part of Elytron and
we might be able to benefit from this in the future.

- Juca.

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