Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by brewmarche 679 days ago
This is the DNS setup I’d have in mind as well.

Regarding the certificates, if you don’t want to set up stuff on clients manually, the only drawback is the use of a wildcard certificate (which when compromised can be used to hijack everything under something.example.com).

An intermediate CA with name constraints (can only sign certificates with names under something.example.com) sounds like a better solution if you deem the wildcard certificate too risky. Not sure which CA can issue it (letsencrypt is probably out) and how well supported it is
1 comments
qwertox 679 days ago
I'm "ok" with that risk. It's less risky than other solutions, and there's also the issue that hijacked.something.example.com needs to be resolved by the internal DNS server.

All of this would most likely need to be an inside job with some relatively big criminal energy. At that level you'd probably also have other attack vectors which you could consider.

link
Helmut10001 678 days ago
This is also my thinking.. if someone compromises your VM that is responsible for retrieving wildcard certs from let's encrypt, then you're probably busted anyway. Such a machine would usually sit at the center of infrastructure, with limited need to be connected to from other machines.
link
brewmarche 678 days ago
Probably most people would deem the risk negligible, but it’s still worth to mention it, since you should evaluate for yourself. Regarding the central machine: the certificate must not only be generated or fetched (which as you said probably will happen “at the center”) but also deployed to the individual services. If you don’t use a central gateway terminating TLS early the certificate will live on many machines, not just “at the center.”
link
Helmut10001 676 days ago
You are absolutely right. And deployment can be set up to open up additional vulnerabilities and holes. But there are also many ways to make the deployment quite robust (e.g. upload via push to a deploy server, distribute from there). ... and just by chance, I've written a small bash script that helps to distribute SSL certificates from a centrally managed "deploy" server 8) [1].

[1]: https://github.com/Sieboldianus/ssl_get

link