Force SSL redirection to target service host for all protocols

[Francis Daly]

On Fri, Jul 03, 2020 at 09:12:56AM -0400, siva.pannier wrote:

Hi there,

> I want all my client applications make call to the service host via proxy.
> And the hosted services are TLSv1.2 enabled. Clients are not in a position
> to upgrade. Hence I want to enforce the SSL encryption when the call
> routed/redirected to the target from proxy.

I may be misunderstanding the terminology, but I think your scenario is
that your clients speak their protocol over a "normal" (non-encrypted)
network connection; and your (upstream) servers allow the protocol both
directly over a "normal" connection, or over a SSL-wrapped connection.

An you want your clients to talk to nginx without encryption, and for
nginx to talk to upstream with encryption.

If nginx does not already have a dedicated module for the protocol you
care about, then possibly the "stream" module with "proxy_ssl" will work
for you.

http://nginx.org/en/docs/stream/ngx_stream_proxy_module.html

That *does* depend on the nature of the protocol, of course -- if the
protocol does not easily allow proxying, then it is not going to easily
work through the nginx stream proxy.

> I have seen few blogs that talks about HTTP to HTTPS redirection. I want to
> do that for all protocols like TCPS, UDPS(DTLS), SMTPS, IIOPS. 
> 
> Can you please share your suggestions on this?

If my protocol writes IP addresses or ports within the content payload,
then a "blind" traffic-forwarder (as "stream" mostly is) will probably
not be able to reliably proxy things that use my protocol.

For the specific protocols you care about: can they be proxied?

I suspect that the list will be interested in the results of your testing,
if you are willing to share them.

Thanks,

	f
-- 
Francis Daly        francis at daoine.org