Ensure App Tier ELB have SSLTLS Certificate attached

Details

When you use HTTPS for your front-end listener, you must deploy an SSL/TLS certificate on your load balancer. The load balancer uses the certificate to terminate the connection and then decrypt requests from clients before sending them to the back-end instances.

The SSLTLS protocol uses an X.509 certificate (SSLTLS server certificate) to authenticate both the client and the back-end application. An X.509 certificate is a digital form of identification issued by a trusted certificate authority (CA) and contains identification information, a validity period, a public key, a serial number, and the digital signature of the issuer.

You can create a certificate using a Third Party Certificate Authority, AWS Certificate Manager or a self signed certificate like OpenSSL.

* Note: an SSL certificate configured on the ELB is not mandatory if you are terminating SSL connections directly on the App Tier EC2 instances, and using a TCP listener on the ELB (TCP pass-through)

All the application traffic between the Web Tier instances and the App Tier ELB nodes should be encrypted using an SSLTLS certificate.

Solution

Using the Amazon unified command line interface:

* Adding a HTTPS listener configured with a SSLTLS certificate (the listener forwards traffic to the backend instances on port 80, but this can be modified by editing InstancePort=80):

aws elb create-load-balancer-listeners –load-balancer-name –listeners Protocol=HTTPS,LoadBalancerPort=443,InstanceProtocol=HTTP,InstancePort=80, SSLCertificateId=

Supportive Information

The following resource is also helpful.

This security hardening control applies to the following category of controls within NIST 800-53: System and Communications Protection.This control applies to the following type of system amazon_aws.

References

Source

Updated on July 16, 2022
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