Its a popular thing to use Apache (or nginx, etc.) as a reverse-proxy server fronting Tomcat. However, documentation on such practices tends to gloss over certain important things. Specifically:
1. Who owns the SSL cert that manages such a configuration. Apache or Tomcat?
2. Is the Apache-to-Tomcat tunnel encrypted? If so, how?
I finally decided to determine by experimentation. Here’s the scoop:
1. Encryption between Apache and Tomcat is not supported by the AJP protocol. If you need back-end encryption, use Apache’s mod_proxy, not mod_ajp.
2. If you make an https connection to a website hosted by Apache or proxied by Apache to Tomcat, the cert that’s applied will be the (x509) cert for that Apache host. Not a Tomcat jks cert.
3. You can configure Apache to proxy incoming SSL traffic to Tomcat even though Tomcat itself isn’t configured for SSL. Simply forward from your Apache ProxyPass/ProxyPassReverse to the Tomcat http port (8080 by default).
Note If you forward SSL to Tomcat via its http port, then none of the traffic between Apache and Tomcat will be encrypted. That’s OK if you are doing a forward within the local machine (using loopback) or if you are OK with security on your LAN.
4. If clear-text between Apache and Tomcat is not acceptable, you can do SSL from Apache to Tomcat. In that case, Tomcat needs its own keystore and certs, independent of the Apache certs. Apache will decrypt incoming Internet traffic so that it can do whatever it needs to do with headers and rewrites, then re-encrypt the proxy data using Tomcat’s cert.
To do SSL between Apache and Tomcat, the ProxyPass/ProxyPassReverse directives should address Tomcat’s HTTPS port (8443). Presumably you can even take plain HTTP coming into Apache and SSL it to Tomcat, but I didn’t bother to check.
Note that between Apache and Tomcat, a self-signed cert is probably good enough. In fact, since the cert won’t be officially registered, it’s one less internal secret for people to learn on the Internet. Apache’s handling of the finer aspects of backend certs are tunable, but the defaults are sufficient for most purposes.