Moving ssl handling from Tomcat to Apache?

Question

In the organisation I work for we are unable to use Tomcat for SSL, since they have a policy of fronting all authentication by managed Apache instances. In this scenario, mod_ssl is used, in conjunction with mod_jk, with the 'REMOTE_USER' being set to 'SSL_CLIENT_S_DN_CN', per http://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/mod/mod_ssl.html .

The web application I am dealing (Alfresco) with was designed with the expectation of SSL on the Tomcat container, with a role mapping happening in Tomcat, but I am not sure how to make it work using mod_ssl instead.

From the web.xml , the settings that I am dealing with are:

   <security-constraint>
      <web-resource-collection>
         <web-resource-name>SOLR</web-resource-name>
         <url-pattern>/wcs/api/solr/*</url-pattern>
      </web-resource-collection>

      <auth-constraint>
         <role-name>repoclient</role-name>
      </auth-constraint>

      <user-data-constraint>
         <transport-guarantee>CONFIDENTIAL</transport-guarantee>
      </user-data-constraint>
   </security-constraint>

   <login-config>
      <auth-method>CLIENT-CERT</auth-method>
      <realm-name>Repository</realm-name>
   </login-config>

   <security-role>
     <role-name>repoclient</role-name>
   </security-role>

Any advice would be appreciated. I have looked around to see if there are any tips on how to deal with this, but I haven't had much luck.

Answer 1

It is no problem to use apache with mod_jk or mod_proxy_ajp as a terminating SSL endpoint. Alfresco's tomcat has SSL configured to secure communication between the alfresco repository and the Solr search engine, so you shouldn't touch the tomcat config for 8080 or 8443 not to break the communication for Solr (the ssl certificate is used for authentication - so don't touch it as long you know what you're doing).

In tomcat's server.xml add or comment in a ajp connector instead. eg

    <!-- Define an AJP 1.3 Connector on port 8009 -->
<Connector port="8009" address="1.2.3.4" protocol="AJP/1.3" redirectPort="8443" scheme="https" proxyPort="443" secure="true" URIEncoding="UTF-8" maxThreads="500" maxSavePostSize="-1" />

Additionally it is best practice to add a parameter address="localhost" for the 8080 and 8443 conectors to hide the port from outside the server.

Here you find how to configure the apache proxy: https://serverfault.com/questions/472491/how-to-set-up-alfresco-share-behind-apache-reverse-proxy