Configuring trusted certificates

When NQRust-Identity communicates with external services or has an incoming connection through TLS, it has to validate the remote certificate in order to ensure it is connecting to a trusted server. This is necessary in order to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks.

The certificates of these clients or servers, or the CA that signed these certificates, must be put in a truststore. This truststore is then configured for use by NQRust-Identity.

Configuring the System Truststore

The existing Java default truststore certs will always be trusted. If you need additional certificates, which will be the case if you have self-signed or internal certificate authorities that are not recognized by the JRE, they can be included in the conf/truststores directory or subdirectories. The certs may be in PEM files, or PKCS12 files with extension .p12, .pfx, or .pkcs12. If in PKCS12, the certs must be unencrypted - meaning no password is expected.

If you need an alternative path, use the --truststore-paths option to specify additional files or directories where PEM or PKCS12 files are located. Paths are relative to where you launched NQRust-Identity, so absolute paths are recommended instead. If a directory is specified, it will be recursively scanned for truststore files.

After all applicable certs are included, the truststore will be used as the system default truststore via the javax.net.ssl properties, and as the default for internal usage within NQRust-Identity.

For example:

bin/kc.[sh|bat] start --truststore-paths=/opt/truststore/myTrustStore.pfx,/opt/other-truststore/myOtherTrustStore.pem

It is still possible to directly set your own javax.net.ssl truststore System properties, but it’s recommended to use the --truststore-paths instead.

Cluster CA certificates (Kubernetes and OpenShift)

When running NQRust-Identity on Kubernetes or OpenShift, the server will automatically include well-known cluster certificate authorities in the system truststore if they are present on the filesystem:

• Kubernetes service account CA: /var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount/ca.crt
• OpenShift service CA: /var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount/service-ca.crt

This behavior is enabled by default and does not require the Operator. It can be controlled with the following option:

• --truststore-kubernetes-enabled=true|false (default: true)

To disable automatically trusting the cluster CAs entirely:

bin/kc.[sh|bat] start --truststore-kubernetes-enabled=false

Note that if the corresponding files are not mounted into the container, they will not be included regardless of the option values.

Hostname Verification Policy

You may refine how hostnames are verified by TLS connections with the tls-hostname-verifier property.

• DEFAULT (the default) allows wildcards in subdomain names (e.g. *.foo.com) to match names with the same number of levels (e.g. a.foo.com, but not a.b.foo.com) - with rules and exclusions for public suffixes based upon https://publicsuffix.org/list/ (opens in a new tab)

• ANY means that the hostname is not verified - this mode should not be used in production.

• WILDCARD (deprecated) allows wildcards in subdomain names (e.g. *.foo.com) to match anything, including multiple levels (e.g. a.b.foo.com). Use DEFAULT instead.

• STRICT (deprecated) allows wildcards in subdomain names (e.g. *.foo.com) to match names with the same number of levels (e.g. a.foo.com, but not a.b.foo.com) - with some limited exclusions. Use DEFAULT instead.

  Please note that this setting does not apply to LDAP secure connections, which require strict hostname checking.

Relevant options