Hi everyone.
I was trying to research about how to implement SSL on the traffic between my clients and the containers that I host on my server.
Basically, my plan was to use upstream SSL in HAProxy to attempt to achieve this, but in order for that to work, each individual container on my server needs to be able to decrypt SSL. I do not think that is possible and that every container has the necessary libraries for it. This puts a halt on my idea for upstream encryption of traffic from my reverse-proxy to my containers.
With that said, ChatGPT suggested I use Kubernetes with a service mesh like Istio. The idea was intriguing so I started to read about it; but before I dive head-first into using k3s (TBH it’s overkill for my setup), is there any way to implement server-side encryption with podman containers and a reverse-proxy?
After writing all of this, I think I’m missing the point about a reverse-proxy being an SSL termination endpoint, but if my question makes sense to you, please let me know your thoughts!
Thanks!
Yes, that’s usually one of the jobs of the reverse proxy. Communication between the RP and an application container running on the same host is typically unencrypted. If you’re really paranoid about a rogue process intercepting HTTP connections between the RP and the application container, setup separate container networks for each application, and/or use unix sockets.
wtf…
Hey, thanks for your comment. Could you explain a bit more about how using Unix sockets would improve my security posture here (in terms of not having unencrypted traffic on the network)? I will think about creating separate namespaces in podman.
Good thing I asked haha. Is the fact that I mentioned ChatGPT setting a wrong impression? I like to go and ask about such questions to ChatGPT/Bing, sometimes they give wonderful answers, sometimes, not the best. Like this one. I thought that there must be an easier way to secure my traffic/do as much as possible to restricting it without jumping straight to k3s.
Thanks!
Nothing wrong with asking LLM’s about topics, I’d even say it’s a good idea instead of directly asking on a forum. Just like searching before asking, asking an LLM before asking humans is good.
And mentioning where you got the recommendation for k8s is also helpful. I’m not knowledgeable about k8s, but I guess the “wtf” was about the overkill of recommending k8s when simpler solutions exist.
Unix sockets have permissions like any file, so it’s simple to restrict access to a user/group and thus process running as the user. If it’s unencrypted http on a server other processes could listen on localhost, but I’m unsure about that part.
Not at all, but the fact that it suggested jumping straight to k8s for such a trivial problem is… interesting.
Unix sockets enforce another layer of protection by requiring the user/application writing/reading to/from them to have a valid UID or be part of the correct group (traditional Linux/Unix permission system). Whereas using plain localhost HTTP networking, a rogue application could somehow listen on the loopback interface and/or exploit a race condition to bind the port and prentend to be the “real” application. Network namespaces (which container management tools use to create isolated virtual networks) mostly solve this problem. Again, basic unencrypted localhost networking is fine for a vast majority of use cases/threat models.