AWS has come up with a new service AWS Certificate Manager. One thing I got from the description is that if we are using this service we don't have to pay for the certificate anymore.
They are providing certificates for Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) and CloudFront, but I didn't find EC2 anywhere.
Is there any way to use the certificate with EC2?
Q: Can I use certificates on Amazon EC2 instances or on my own servers?
No. At this time, certificates provided by ACM can only be used with specific AWS services.
Q: With which AWS services can I use certificates provided by ACM?
You can use ACM with the following AWS services:
• Elastic Load Balancing
• Amazon CloudFront
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk
• Amazon API Gateway
https://aws.amazon.com/certificate-manager/faqs/
You can't install the certificates created by Amazon Certificate Manager (ACM) on resources you have direct low-level access to, like EC2 or servers outside of AWS, because you aren't provided with access to the private keys. These certs can only be deployed on resources managed by the AWS infrastructure -- ELB and CloudFront -- because the AWS infrastructure holds the only copies of the private keys for the certificates that it generates, and maintains them under tight security with auditable internal access controls.
You'd have to have your EC2 machines listening behind CloudFront or ELB (or both, cascaded, would also work) in order to use these certs for content coming from EC2... because you can't install these certs directly on EC2 machines.
No, you cannot use aws certificate manager for deploying certs on EC2. The certificate manager certs can only be deployed against cloudfront and elastic load balancer. Inoredr to use it on ec2, you need to put elb on top of ec2, so that request from client to load balancer will be https protected and from elb to ec2 webserver will be on http.
If you are using AWS ACM Cert for internal purpose only then you could probably use AWS ACM Private CA to issue the certs.(I think you can use it for public/external traffic purpose as well if your root CA is publicly trusted CA).
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/acm-pca/latest/userguide/PcaGetStarted.html
During Application/EC2/Container startup, set a step to export your ACM Private CA issued Cert/Private Key to your destination and start referring that for serving the traffic.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/acm/export-certificate.html
One good thing is, you can control who can call export cert feature using IAM Role so not everyone can download private key of the cert.
One downside with this is, private CA is expensive AWS service($400/month).
https://aws.amazon.com/certificate-manager/pricing/
Adding to the comments above, you can't use the AWS Certificate Manager for this, but you can add a Let's Encrypt certificate to ec2 on a Windows server running IIS and it's pretty easy:
Associate an elastic ip with your ec2 instance.
Make sure you have a registered domain. You can't use ec2----------.us-east-1.compute.amazonaws.com type names that come with your instance.
Through your domain provider's DNS settings have your domain point to your Elastic IP.
Connect to your ec2 instance and add your domain name to the site bindings.
Go to https://github.com/PKISharp/win-acme/releases
Look under assets, and use the latest version (win-acme.v2.0.10.444.zip for example). This is the only assets folder that you need.
Unzip the folder, open the terminal as administrator, and cd into the unzipped folder.
Run wacs.exe and follow the prompts.
Make sure the security group assigned to your instance allows traffic (at the very least your own IP) through the HTTPS port you chose in IIS; this is port 443 by default.
I found the links below helpful when I was figuring this out. Here is a video using an earlier release if you need more help, but it's the same idea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fq5OUOjumuM
Also this article might be helpful:
https://weblog.west-wind.com/posts/2016/feb/22/using-lets-encrypt-with-iis-on-windows
Related
I have a pretty simple setup with an Application Gateway (AG), that sends traffic to a virtual machine running Ubuntu. The AG is loaded with an SSL certificate. The VM is set up to only allow incoming traffic from the AG, but it's an HTTP connection. This works, but I want to secure the traffic between my VM and AG. I can't find any relevant settings or documentation for this however.
How do I encrypt traffic between an Application Gateway and Virtual Machine? I considered a private link to at least force traffic over the Azure network, but private links only support PaaS products, where a VM is IaaS.
I assume your use the private IP of your VM in the backend settings of your Application Gateway. If so, this means that the traffic stays within your VNET and thus on the Microsoft network and also within the same region. You do not not need something like Private Link here.
So the only thing you could potentially do is to SSL-enable the endpoint on the VM and use an encrypted HTTPS connection between AppGW and your VM.
you have to do the same thing as with the api-gateway, load a certificate into de service deployed in the virtual machine and expose the API of this service using SSL protocol so the communication will be encrypted using that certificate.
The way to do it is different depending on which technology you are using to deploy your service. For example, if you are using spring-boot you can see how to do it here
https://www.baeldung.com/spring-boot-https-self-signed-certificate
However, you can use mutual-tls if you want that the only service that could connect to your VM's deployed service is the AG.
https://developers.cloudflare.com/access/service-auth/mtls
I have an express js application running on aws ec2 instance that acts as rest api for my application. If i want to add ssl certification for my expressjs api what should i do?
1)Do i need to get a domain with ssl certification and map it to my ec2 ip address?
2)Or its enough to put aws API gateway in front of my ec2 instance , use the free ssl from ACM and get a domain without ssl?
3)Or get a domain with ssl and also ssl in acm?
(kind of confused with understanding domain and ssl, any help would be appreciated)
Thanks in advance.
The default pattern for this kind of use case, assuming that you don't want to manage a domain + certificate, is to put your EC2 instance behind a service that integrates with ACM, such as Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) or an Amazon CloudFront distribution.
API Gateway, while also giving you an SSL certificate, would also bring many other features that you'd still have to pay for.
Example
EDIT:
Original question was not formatted properly and I missed option 3).
If you are going to get a domain, then you have other options such as managing it with Route53 and directing your traffic to the EC2, or do the same but with the domain registrar. This assumes that the EC2 has a static IP address that allows you to address it. At this point, you can get an SSL Cert either via AWS ACM or by other means directly on the EC2 (i.e. Let's Encrypt). The difference between the two, aside from price, would be that one requires you to manage your own certificate while the other is an AWS managed service.
I have created Windows Server VM in Azure and deployed my site to IIS, which is now accessible at https://mysite.westeurope.cloudapp.azure.com/
however I get certificate error when I try to visit it from outside the vm.
how do I configure the VM to have proper https without certificate errors (just like app service - mysite.azurewebsites.net)?
As the comments from micker #micker, you can't get an SSL certificate for this subdomain westeurope.cloudapp.azure.com which is owned by Microsoft.
Since you host your websites on Azure VM, you could purchase a domain then get an SSL certificate for your own domain, then bind the SSL certificate to your custom domain in IIS on the Azure VM. You can either purchase that certificate through Azure or an external provider or get a free SSL cert from Let's Encrypt.
However, if you just want to have a test in your test environment, you can use a self-signed certification with this DNS name like vma.centralus.cloudapp.azure.com. You can follow steps in How To Create A SHA-256 Self-Signed Certificate on the Azure VM then export this cert .cer format file on the Azure VM and import the .cer cert under the mmc---certificate---local machine---Trusted root certification Authorities on the machine where you want to access the websites. Please note this It's not recommended to use self-signed cert in your production environment.
I had same issue, and I found resolution without custom domain using following additional azure settings.
create Azure WAF, add custom rules to deny if not in IP list - this is if you need ip whitelisting, useful if your main domain uses akamai or other edge routing to point to external hosting of subdomains, you can use whitelist to restrict access to the akamai or other servers, though this takes some big lists you must paste of ranges one row at a time. Set any other web app firewall rules you want enforced for allow/deny.
Create Azure Front Door named like you want as an endpoint url e.g. myappfrontdoor will make myappfrontdoor.azurefd.net. in backend pool specify the your public-ip shared dns name (see step 3) like myapptest..cloudapp.azure.com.
This is the important step : in Settings at top of front door designer, disable cert validation. in routing rules config, no condition, forward to backend pool setup in prior step. This ignores the fact that you cannot cert your cloudapp.azure.com endpoint, and wraps it with a *.azurefd.net certificate.
In your azure firewall, Edit NAT rules, set rule name myapp-web-fd-... , tcp, ip address, 147.243.0.0/16 (this is Azure's front door backend ip range). destination should be the firewall's own public ip. destination port 443, translated address should be the target vm's azure internal ip, target port - service port.
Now you will have a site like myappfrontdoor.azurefd.net.
Note that Azure Front Door and WAF have their own pricing costs, so maybe it is cheaper for you to buy a domain. Hopefully you are also using Azure Firewall, though expensive. If not, one could point to public ip directly on NSG or on vm itself but I wouldn't skip having a firewall for a public server. There is a standing Azure enhancement request to get Azure Front Door to recognize certificates, but it was triaged 2 years ago and still not added, so not sure if it will be worked. If it ever does get worked, devs could make own cert auth and self-signed cert with expirations to more securely hook front door to azure internal vm. For now, have to rely on the front door backend setting, waf, and azure firewall to have these things routed.
There are some options in Akamai and other edge routing systems to import cert and self-created authority sort of, but I've not tried that yet, so cannot confirm this would cleanly wrap your azure site without cert errors. You can make a self-signed authority using openssl commands as noted in other posts out and about on the web.
The simplest and cheapest option is to purchase a domain and use a cname dns record to map your new domain to your Azure subdomain address - an "A" record is not required. Also per answer above, a WAF is expensive and possibly unnecessary for a test set up (but a requirement for a production website). You can use Certbot and NGINX to create a free Lets Encrypt certificate for your domain and assign it to your website.
Adding a Public IP Address, Load Balancer, and Network Security Group to your Azure Resource Group may also be required to provide access to your website. This is largely how my test configuration is set up except I'm using a Linux VM, have a single wildcard certificate, and use NGINX to reverse proxy 3 websites.
I have an application which is running on an AWS ECS cluster which has 2 instances. I'm using EC2 instance type for ECS. I also have an application load balancer attached to this ECS cluster which uses dynamic port mapping. Right now, the application is working fine with the Load balancer's domain name.
I'm planning to add SSL feature for the load balancer and also a domain name for my application. For simplicity, I'm planning to use AWS ACM to create SSL certificates for HTTPS connectivity. But I'm not very aware of the domain name registration and all.
So I'm not sure on where to attach this domain if I go for a new domain registration. What IP do I use for domain registration? Or If I have a domain name, can I attach it to my application.
But still, I'm not sure where to point to. Any help regarding attaching domain to app with ecs and aws alb will be appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
Basically, you have to create an A record in your DNS server pointing to the ELB.
Amazon has Route53 for registering domains, if your domain is registered with Route53 it's easy as selecting the ELB from the list on the route53 console.
If you host your domain on a different registrar (e.g. GoDaddy) then make sure your ELB is publicly available and use its address for host address if your domain A record.
I used self signed openssl for APIs but when they are used client side it is showing the error message in secured response. How to provide original ssl cert? And I'm using elastic bean stalk in aws to host APIs. In that I have come across ACM and that is integrated with Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon CloudFront. So which one should I use from those two? If I use any of those two, will that be enough in production mode? Or should I use any other one?
You can setup a certificate with ACM that matches your DNS record. Then point that DNS record to your Elastic Beanstalk Environments DNS record. Which will be something like ENV-name.76p5XXXX22.us-east-1.elasticbeanstalk.com
AWS has a document you can follow here.
Let's begin.
For development purposes, self signed certificate is okay. You can set NODE_TLS_REJECT_UNAUTHORIZED=0 in environment variables.
For AWS Elastic Beanstalk behind Load Balancer, you can have 2 ways -
One way encrypted - In this you add a certificate in your load balancer only. This way, Client to Load balancer is encrypted and then load balancer to instances is unencrypted. This is safe. I use this. This way I don't have to use any certificates on my instances and I run a normal HTTP server on instances. You can choose to allow only HTTPS or not from load balancer settings.
End to end encrypted - In this you use a certificate on your instances as well and you can choose to forward encrypted traffic directly from Load Balancer to your instances or you can decrypt and re-encrypt traffic and send to instances. I don't have any experience with this. The first option is suitable for most cases. Refer to this: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/configuring-https-endtoend.html