2

TL;DR

I want to have "some thing" to handle client-certs on behalf a server that is unable to do it, for secure user authentication in addition to regular TLS encryption.

Context

In this question How can I double check security against a TLS on a public IP? the answers set clear that regular TLS does not typically do client authentication, although it seems it would be possible if the server requests it.

Let's suppose I have a server that is able to communicate via "plain text" or "on a TLS channel" (I can re-start the server with or without TLS), but if TLS is enabled, the server does not support checking client-certificates for auth.

The original question was for a docker registry, but I generalize the question to any server supporting TLS but not client-side certs.

What I'm thinking

I am thinking of offloading the "TLS part" to a security-specific software (much similar to what SSH port-forwarding tunnels are) and decouple the server and the TLS handling.

Probably there would be 2 processes involved:

  • The server listens in a firewalled localhost port or a linux socket in "plain text", but as it is firewalled it can never be reached from the outside.
  • Some kind of "security middleware" (Probably OpenSSL, but I'm not sure) -I think it'd be called a TLS terminator, but I'm neither really sure, too- to do this:
    • Handle the public-IP listening
    • Handle the server-side certs to secure the channel via TLS
    • Handle the client-side certs to check authenticity (probably against a set of public keys I'll have previously uploaded in the server)
    • If and only if the client belongs to a white-list of users, then forward the decrypted channel to the regualar plain-text server.

Questions

  1. Would be this TLS offloading a normal setup?

  2. If so, is OpenSSL a good handler for this offloading?

  3. If yes, what documentation could be a good starting point for this kind of setup, where I can read on and learn?

Thnx.

2
  • You won't receive a client certificate unless you ask for it. Your server can undoubtedly be configured to ask for it.
    – user207421
    May 2, 2020 at 10:51
  • Cross-referenced here forums.docker.com/t/… May 2, 2020 at 10:56

1 Answer 1

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  1. Would be this TLS offloading a normal setup?

Offloading TLS to something else if your server doesn't support what you want is a normal setup.

  1. If so, is OpenSSL a good handler for this offloading?

I would not expect to build a solution for this directly with openssl. Load balancers do this sort of thing all the time. You can also do it with stunnel; here is an example setup, boiling down to these key config lines:

verify = 2 # This enables the mutual authentication
CAfile = /etc/ssl/certs/root-genfic.crt

Where client certs are signed by root-genfic.crt.

  1. If yes, what documentation could be a good starting point for this kind of setup, where I can read on and learn?

stunnel documentation and related resources are available at the stunnel web site.

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