SSL – RedThunder.Blog

Managing multiple Let’s Encrypt certificates with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

In my previous post I explained how you can use Let’s Encrypt and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) serverless functions to obtain a publicly signed SSL certificate, and automatically manage its renewal lifecycle. The solution works as expected; I have a Let’s Encrypt certificate for my website automatically renewing 30 days before expiry. If you haven’t read my previous post I’d recommend taking a look before following the setup outlined below as it covers how the solution works, and some prerequisites.

Having multiple workloads running in various OCI regions I started thinking about a more elegant way to provision certificates across multiple regions. Certificates stored in the certificate service are only available to resources in the same region and would have required a function to be deployed in each region, and for each SSL certificate required.

I’ve since updated the solution to address this requirement. It is now possible to provision certificates across multiple OCI regions using a single OCI Function application. I’ve also taken the opportunity to implement other features such as:

Loading a list of certificates you want to manage from a JSON file stored in Object Storage.
Adding support for wildcard SSL certificates.
Adding support for Subject Alternative Names (SAN) in addition to the CN name.
Adding support for the use of DNS zones and Vaults that reside in different regions to the OCI Function.

Adding support to specify which vault, and region to use for a given certificate ensures that workloads with strict cryptographic key material requirements can still benefit from this solution.

If you’ve already followed the instructions from my previous post, the solution will continue to work as described. The only limitation being that it’ll only work for a single certificate. By following the steps below you can easily upgrade to issuing multiple certificates. If you haven’t set anything up yet that’s also fine as I’ll be covering the full install again here.

Let’s Encrypt serverless automation with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Let’s Encrypt made its debut back in late 2015. It is a free Certificate Authority provided by the Internet Security Research Group. The goal was to support the adoption of SSL / TLS to ensure the privacy of information sent over the public Internet. Let’s Encrypt is now serving over 2.5M certificates per day.

If you’re reading this it’s likely you’ve had to deal with SSL certificates before. It’s also likely some of you will have investigated an outage, only to find that an SSL certificate expired somewhere that no one knew about. Certificate discovery, management, and renewal can be time consuming and not much fun.

Cloud providers have made this job easier with the introduction of certificate services that are able to issue public Domain Validation (DV) certificates. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) currently allows you to create private Certificate Authorities (CA’s), private Certificates, and private Certificate Authority bundles. Private certificate resources are used to secure communication across a private network, where certificates can be installed and trusted to enable secure communication.

But what about publicly signed certs for users connecting over the Internet? Using a private OCI certificate will result in a “certificate not trusted” error in your web browser; this is where Let’s Encrypt comes in. I’m going to show you how to run a completely automated serverless Let’s Encrypt solution in your OCI tenancy to install and automatically renew certificates that show as trusted in your web browser.

Configure Letsencrypt SSL Certificate in Weblogic 12c

Who doesn’t like the security. This is one of critical element of our IT Infrastructure. Recently I was doing one POC and got requirement to setup a valid SSL certificate in Weblogic. However, since it was just an POC we were not having any valid SSL certificate issued by some Certificate Authority. Later, I came across for one website called https://letsencrypt.org/ . Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open certificate authority (CA). they give people the digital certificates they need in order to enable HTTPS (SSL/TLS) for websites, and its free, yes you heard correctly It’s FREE !!!. You don’t need to pay them at all. So if you need a valid SSL certificate for your POC or even for Production environment you can get one from them. Although their certificate comes with 3 month validity, so while using for Production environment user need to keep renewing with them with simple automated process.

In this blog we will be learning how we can generate letsencrypt SSL certificate, what’s prerequisite to get the certificate and setup that certificate in Weblogic server to enable SSL communication.

So, Lets move on. We will be doing below stuff in sequence –

Get a registered domain name (This required while generating SSL Cert)
Install Certbot ACME Tool and Apache HTTP Server
Generate Letsencrypt SSL Certificate
Configure Letsencrypt SSL in Weblogic Identity Store

Continue reading “Configure Letsencrypt SSL Certificate in Weblogic 12c”

Disabling Hostname Validation in Nashorn Javascript

So, the other day I found myself having to connect to a server with self-signed SSL certificates while writing Nashorn Javascript. The precise details of how I found myself in this situation are pretty unimportant (I was re-writing an ant build script which had to obtain a build parameter by querying a running instance of a server in dev…), but the problem was suitably esoteric that I couldn’t find a code snippet with a quick search, while probably not being so esoteric that I am the only one who will ever need this, and hence, this post.

Continue reading “Disabling Hostname Validation in Nashorn Javascript”