sslsubdomainlets-encryptwildcard-subdomainacme

Automated ACME subdomain SSL certificate generation for resources on different IP addresses


I've been investigating the possibility of migrating to using Let's Encrypt to maintain the SSL certificates we have in place for the various resources we use for our operations. We have the following resources using SSL certificates:

As indicated above, the SSL certificate for the main website (www) is maintained by the 3rd-party host, so I don't generally mess with that one. However, as you can tell, the DNS records for each of these endpoints point to a variety of different IP addresses. This is where my inexperience with the overall process of issuing and deploying SSL certificates has me a bit confused.

First of all, since I don't manage or maintain the main website, I'm currently manually generating the CSR's for each of the endpoints from the server/service that provides the endpoint - one from the IIS server, a different one from the RDP server, another from the WS_FTP server, and one from the hardware firewall. The manual process, while not excessively time-consuming, still requires me to go through several steps with different server systems requiring different processes.

I've considered using one of Let's Encrypt's free wildcard SSL certificates to cover all four of these endpoints (*.example.com), but I don't want to "interfere" with what our main website host is doing on that end. I realize the actual certificate itself is presented by the server to which the client is connecting, so it shouldn't matter (right?), but I'd probably still be more comfortable with individual SSL certificates for each of the subdomain endpoints.

So, I've been working on building an application using the Certes ACME client library in an attempt to automatically handle the entire SSL process from CSR to deployment. However, I've run into a few snags:

This challenge is not suitable for most people. It is best suited to authors of TLS-terminating reverse proxies that want to perform host-based validation like HTTP-01, but want to do it entirely at the TLS layer in order to separate concerns. Right now that mainly means large hosting providers, but mainstream web servers like Apache and Nginx could someday implement this (and Caddy already does).

Pros:

  • It works if port 80 is unavailable to you.
  • It can be performed purely at the TLS layer.

Cons:

  • It’s not supported by Apache, Nginx, or Certbot, and probably won’t be soon.
  • Like HTTP-01, if you have multiple servers they need to all answer with the same content.
  • This method cannot be used to validate wildcard domains.

So, based on my research so far and my environment, my three biggest questions are these:

  1. Would the TLS-ALPN-01 validation method be an effective - or even available - option for generating the individual SSL certificates for each subdomain? Since the firewall and FTP server cannot currently serve up the appropriate files on port 80, I don't see any way to use the HTTP-01 validation for these subdomains. Not being able to use an API to automate a DNS-01 validation would make that method generally more trouble than it's worth. While I could probably do the HTTP-01 validation for the client portal - and maybe the RDP server (I haven't gotten that far in my research yet) - I'd still be left with handling the other two subdomains manually.
  2. Would I be better off trying to do a wildcard certificate for the subdomains? Other than "simplifying" the process by reducing the number of SSL certificates that need to be issued, is there any inherent benefit to going this route versus using individual certificates for each subdomain? Since the main site is hosted/managed by a 3rd-party and (again) I can't currently use an API to automate a DNS-01 validation, I suppose I would need to use an HTTP-01 validation. Based on my understanding, that means that I would need to get access/permission to create the response file, along with the appropriate directories on that server.
  3. Just to be certain, is there any chance of causing some sort of "conflict" if I were to generate/deploy a wildcard certificate to the subdomains while the main website still used its own SSL certificate for the www? Again, I wouldn't think that to be the case, but I want to do my best to avoid introducing more complexity and/or problems into the situation.

Solution

  • I've responded to your related question on https://community.certifytheweb.com/t/tls-alpn-01-validation/1444/2 but the answer is to use DNS validation and my suggestion is to use Certify DNS (https://docs.certifytheweb.com/docs/dns/providers/certifydns), which is an alternative managed alternative cloud implementation of acme-dns (CNAME delegation of DNS challenge responses.

    Certify DNS is compatible with most existing acme-dns clients so it can be used with acme-dns compatible clients as well as with Certify The Web (https://certifytheweb.com)