Securing Mobile Foundation deployments on IBM Cloud Private using your own security certificates

IBM Mobile Foundation deployments on ICP has https enabled by default with NodePort. To configure using your own security certificates (for both NodePort and ingress) follow the steps below.

Case A : During setting up of Mobile Foundation on ICP

In general, we enable https by configuring keystore and truststore during the deployment at the time of intial setting up of Mobile Foundation on ICP as follows.

  1. Create a secret with keystore.jks, keystore-password.txt, truststore.jks, truststore-password.txt and provide the secret name in the field keystores.keystoresSecretName.

  2. Keep the files keystore.jks and its password in a file named keystore-password.txt and truststore.jks and its password in a file named truststore-password.jks.

  3. Execute the following from the command line:

kubectl create secret generic mfpf-cert-secret --from-file keystore-password.txt --from-file truststore-password.txt --from-file keystore.jks --from-file truststore.jks

Note: The names of the files should be the same as mentioned, i.e, keystore.jks, keystore-password.txt, truststore.jks and truststore-password.txt. Make sure you provide the name of the secret in keystoresSecretName to override the default keystores

Case B: Post Mobile Foundation deployment on ICP

In the case of Mobile Foundation being already deployed on ICP and if one wants to enable HTTPS, below are the steps.

  1. Follow the steps 1-3 listed in Case A above.
  2. Run the following command to get the values from the helm deployment: bash helm get values <helm-name> > values.yaml
  3. Make sure the following entries are added to the values.yaml (in addition to the appropriate data according to your own environments) and make sure that the yaml is valid

      enabled: true
      hostname: <host-name>
      sslPassThrough: false
      tlsEnabled: true
      tlsSecretName: "<cluster-name>"
      keystoresSecretName: "mfpf-cert-secret"
  4. Unzip the mfp-icp PPA archive (downloaded from passport advantage) used to load the images of mfp.
  5. Locate the charts directory within the extracted artifacts
  6. Perform the helm upgrade

      helm upgrade <helm-release-name> ./ibm-mfpf-server-prod-<chart_version>.tgz -f values.yaml

Sample command for adding the certificate to the trust store

 keytool -import -storepass <worklight-storepass> -noprompt -alias icp -keystore ./usr-mfpf-server/security/truststore.jks -trustcacerts -file <mycert-loc>/wildcardcert.crt

For more details on Enabling SSL on IBM Liberty on ICP, refer to the documentation.

Last modified on November 04, 2018