Encrypting Connections
TigerGraph supports secure data-in-flight communication, using SSL/TLS encryption protocol. This applies to any outward-facing channel, including GSQL clients, RESTPP endpoints, and the GraphStudio web interface. When SSL/TLS is enabled, HTTPS takes the place of HTTP for RESTPP and GraphStudio connections.
Prerequisites
You should have basic knowledge about how SSL works:
What the SSL certificate and key are used for
That an SSL certificate is bound to a domain
How an SSL certificate chain works
A good primer on SSL is available to https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/ssl/ssl_intro.html
Nginx-Based
TigerGraph uses the Nginx web server, so SSL configuration makes use of some built-in support in Nginx.
http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/configuring_https_servers.html
Step 1. Obtain an SSL Certificate
The two main options for obtaining an SSL Certificate are to generate your own self-signed certificate or to purchase a certificate from a trusted Certificate Authority. Regardless of which method you choose, your certificate should be chained to a trusted root certificate embedded in your browser. The options and details for producing a trusted SSL certificate are beyond the scope of this document. The focus of this document is how to configure your TigerGraph system to use the certificate to enable SSL.
Option 1: Using a Certificate From A Trusted Agent
First, obtain an SSL certificate from a trusted agent of your choice. Certificate vendors will provide clear instructions for ordering a certificate and then for installing it on your system.
Then you can configure the certificate with gadmin config entry ssl
Option 2: Create a Self-Signed Certificate
There are multiple ways to create a self-signed certificate. One example is shown below.
For simplicity, the method below will use the root certificate directly as the HTTPS server certificate. This method is satisfactory for testing but should not be used for a production system.
In the example below, the Common Name value should be your server hostname, since HTTPS certificates are bound to domain names.
Change the Certificate Permission
For security reasons, the certificates can only be used with permission 600 or less.
Step 2: Configure SSL with gadmin
gadmin
With the self-signed certificate successfully generated, you can configure it with gadmin
, so that all the HTTP traffic will be protected with SSL.
TigerGraph's SSL only accepts PEM-encoded certificates. If you have a certificate encoded in other formats (e.g. DER), you need to convert it to a PEM-encoded certificate first.
After saving the settings, apply the configuration settings.
Then restart the following services: gsql
, nginx
, ts3
, and gui
.
Testing Your SSL Connection
Now you may test the connection.
A direct curl request to the server will fail due to certificate verification failure:
In v1.2, the default TCP/IP port for Nginx has changed from 44240 to 14240, to avoid possible port conflicts with Zookeeper.
You may use the -k option to turn off the verification, but it is unsafe and not recommended.
To successfully make requests with curl, you will need to specify the certificate by using the --cacert
parameter:
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