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Status Not under consideration
Categories z/TPF
Created by Guest
Created on Nov 12, 2019

RequestSupport multiple SSL certificates based on the URL name.

Under current INETD SSL server model, all customer URLs have to be included in a single certificate if default HTTPS port number is used. Obtaining and maintaining multiple customer domains in a single certificate is very difficult task for several reasons:
• Customers are added/deleted sometimes, then the certificate has to be reissued.
• Certificate Authority's security policy may not allow multiple domains mixed in a single certificate.
• Customer's security policy may not allow other domain names mixed in their certificate.

Supporting URL-name based multiple certificates will be useful feature for HTTPS web servers and other SSL servers that support multiple clients. This enhancement may not be easy under current INETD SSL model design, but we hope IBM can find a way to support it.

Idea priority Medium
  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Jan 24, 2020

    IBM does not intend to implement this in the foreseeable future.

    We recently reviewed the RFE related to having multiple server certificates for a single HTTP server / port. One of the reasons this became important in the distributed world is because having a separate HTTP or Apache server would require an entire separate long running process. So, on say a Linux system, having three separate server certificates required resources for 3 different HTTP server processes and the resources those servers would consume. So this really became a problem of resource consumption on a given server platform.

    However, in TPF this is not an issue. Creating a separate server listening on its own IP address does not consume any resources at all. In fact, a long running process wouldn't even exist. So, the need for having a single TPF server with the ability to define multiple server certificates becomes less important.

    In addition, this is not a trivial effort for us to implement and there is concern about the performance implications this change may have. Today, we read in the server certificate as part of the CTX created for the server, so this is done once at server startup. The performance concern is the model would have to change to read in the correct certificate each time a new session is started to the server. Meaning we cannot pre-read the certificate for a given server, because that server can technically handle multiple certificates. This would require us to go down to the file system for SSL session created to the server, which would have a significant performance impact.

    The lab believes the better solution for this is having multiple HTTP server processes listening on their own IP address (can be the same port but doesn't have to). Each of these IP addresses defined for HTTP would correspond to a particular hostname being accessed on TPF. This way you don't have multiple host names resolving to the same TPF IP address. Hostname sha.svcs.entsvcs.net would resolve to VIPA 1 on TPF and hostname shares.ual.com would resolve to VIPA 2. A separate server would be defined for each and those servers would be listening on port 443 but listening on a specific IP address for each hostname.