How to Use a Signed SSL Certificate with Airlock

When Airlock is deployed via the AWS Marketplace, Windows Azure Marketplace or other third-party cloud marketplace, SSL will already be enabled via a self-signed certificate. It is recommended you replace this self-signed certificate with a valid certificate issued to your organization by a trusted authority. The instructions for how to do this are described below.

First, create a private key and a certificate signing request (CSR) for Airlock on your domain. In this walkthrough we are using the domain airlock.yourdomain.com as an example.

openssl req -new -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -keyout philter_yourdomain_com.key -out philter_youdomain_com.csr

Submit the CSR to your SSL certificate vendor of choice and complete the SSL certificate ordering process. If prompted for a web server during the process, select Apache or Nginx. Once the process is complete and the certificate is issued you will receive a few files. The files you will need are summarized in the table below. The file names may vary and you may also receive other files as well.

File Name	Description	Creator
`philter_yourdomain_com.csr`	Certificate signing request	Created by you
`philter_yourdomain_com.key`	Certificate private key	Created by you
`philter_yourdomain_com.ca-bundle`	Intermediate certificates provided by the issuing authority	Received from SSL authority
`philter_yourdomain_com.crt`	The SSL certificate for airlock.yourdomain.com	Received from SSL authority

When prompted for a keystore password we will use changeit. It's recommended you use a more secure password.

The first thing to do is to convert the certificate and the private key to PKCS12 format in airlock.p12:

openssl pkcs12 -export -in philter_yourdomain_com.crt -inkey philter_yourdomain_com.key -name airlock -out airlock.p12

Now import the P12 file into a keystore airlock.jks:

keytool -importkeystore -deststorepass changeit -destkeystore airlock.jks -srckeystore airlock.p12 -srcstoretype PKCS12

Add the intermediate certificate provided by the issuing authority to the keystore:

keytool -import -alias intermediate -trustcacerts -file philter_yourdomain.com.ca-bundle -keystore airlock.jks

Update Airlock's settings in application.properties:

# SSL certificate settings
server.ssl.key-store-type=JKS
server.ssl.key-store=/path/to/airlock.jks
server.ssl.key-store-password=changeit
server.ssl.key-alias=airlock

Restart Airlock:

sudo systemctl restart airlock

Execute an API status request to verify Airlock is running as expected. With the -v option we can see the details of the SSL certificate:

curl -v https://airlock.yourdomain.com:8080/api/status

Look in the response for details of the certificate. Our domain was airlock.mtnfog.dev:

* Server certificate:
*  subject: CN=airlock.mtnfog.dev
*  start date: Apr 21 00:00:00 2020 GMT
*  expire date: Apr 21 23:59:59 2021 GMT
*  subjectAltName: host "airlock.mtnfog.dev" matched cert's "airlock.mtnfog.dev"
*  issuer: C=GB; ST=Greater Manchester; L=Salford; O=Sectigo Limited; CN=Sectigo RSA Domain Validation Secure Server CA
*  SSL certificate verify ok.

Last modified: 17 November 2023