How to achieve 2 servers to communicate over HTTPS and IP addresses

elano7

10/18/23, 7:05 PM

I am not an expert in this topic and so did a lot of research but could not find a clear anwser that I could understand.

I have 2 webapps (microservices) on 2 servers/machines. The webapps communicate with each other over http requests.

I would like to let them communicate using HTTPS (I think that whould be more secure).

The problem is, I use IP addresses of those 2 servers for communication, they have no domains. And I would not like to bind them to any domain, because their communication is just 'private', between them.

If I understood well, to enable HTTPS communication I need a certificate, but certificates are only possible for domains (or IPs that I own, but in my case the host is the owner of the IPs).

Am I doing/understanding something wrong? What should be the solution?

I appreciate your suggestions. Thanks in advance.

2 + 0

linux

https

Score:2

Server

vidarlo

10/18/23, 7:20 PM

You have two options:

Configure self signed certificates, and configure your application to trust the certificate
Set up DNS and use e.g. Lets Encrypt certificates to secure the communication.

The security is more or less the same in both scenarios. Your communication is not private just because you don't use DNS. The complete IPv4 address space is regularly scanned.

+ 2

elano7

10/18/23, 8:43 PM

Thanks. You helped me. Especially your advice that an IP not using DNS is not more private.

vidarlo

10/18/23, 8:54 PM

Rely on authentication to ensure secrecy. Trying to be obscure on the Internet doesn't work.

Score:2

Server

longneck

10/18/23, 7:21 PM

You can still generate self-signed certificates with your host names. Then you can configure your services to trust the self-signed certificates of the other server.

+ 0

Elon Musk

I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

EN: How to achieve 2 servers to communicate over HTTPS and IP addresses

Post an answer

Most people don’t grasp that asking a lot of questions unlocks learning and improves interpersonal bonding. In Alison’s studies, for example, though people could accurately recall how many questions had been asked in their conversations, they didn’t intuit the link between questions and liking. Across four studies, in which participants were engaged in conversations themselves or read transcripts of others’ conversations, people tended not to realize that question asking would influence—or had influenced—the level of amity between the conversationalists.