SSL - Windows

This article shows how to use SSL connections with the message bus on Windows.

Certificates

In order to use an SSL connection you will need some certificates. See the article here for creating SSL certificates on windows,

Configuration

To use SSL we need a custom configuration. We can see the standard configuration [here][configuration.md]. Create the file appsettings-ssl.ssl with the following contents.

{
    "distributor": {
        "address": "0.0.0.0",
        "port": 9001,
        "authentication": {
            "assemblyPath": null,
            "assemblyName": "JetBlack.MessageBus.Common",
            "typeName": "JetBlack.MessageBus.Common.Security.Authentication.NullAuthenticator",
            "args": []
        },
        "heartbeatInterval": "00:00:00",
        "sslConfig": {
            "isEnabled": true,
            "storeLocation": "LocalMachine",
            "subjectName":  "windowsvm.jetblack.net"
        },
        "allow": [
            "All"
        ],
        "deny": [
            "None"
        ],
        "isAuthorizationRequired": false
    },
    "Logging": {
        "LogLevel": {
            "Default": "Debug",
            "System": "Information",
            "Microsoft": "Information"
        },
        "Console": {
            "IncludeScopes": true
        }
    }
}

The SSL configuration is under the sslConfig tag. The [storeLocation](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.security.cryptography.x509certificates.storelocation) refers to the location of the certificates in the trust store. This will either be LocalMachine or CurrentUser depending on how you've set it up. The subjectName is the CN in the certificate.

Now create a distributor-ssl.bat file to run the application. The following assumes the distributor was unpacked to C:\Distributor.

JetBlack.MessageBus.Distributor %~dp0%\appsettings-ssl.json

The settings file is provided as the first argument and must be an absolute path.

When the distributor is started we get the following message.

2021-08-01 09:05:15.2016415 info: JetBlack.MessageBus.Distributor.Acceptor[0]
      Listening on 0.0.0.0:9001 with SSL enabled with NULL authentication

Clients

To Enable SSL on the clients the isSslEnabled flag must be set to true when the client is created.

var client = Client.Create("localhost", 9001, isSslEnabled: true);