SSL Inbound Inspection

[MohammedAsik]

Hi Team

Kindly help with below query.

We approx host 100 websites of our partners. All websites are on SSL (https).

I want to configure SSL Inbound Inspection. As per my understanding, I need to import SSL certificate of 100 websites for SSL inbound inpection. However this is not feasible.

Is there any other simple way to implement the same.

Regards

Mohammed Asik M

[reaper]

hi @MohammedAsik 

No, this is required: With SSL inbound inspection, the firewall is impersonating the server by handling the ssl handshake. It needs to have the real certificate for the client to trust this connection and not throw an error

[MohammedAsik]

Hi Reaper

I host more than 100+ websites.

Do I need to upload certificate of all websites?

Will it impact performance of Palo?

Regards

Mohammed Asik M

[SteveCantwell]

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@MohammedAsik wrote:

Hi Reaper

I host more than 100+ websites.

Do I need to upload certificate of all websites?

Will it impact performance of Palo?

Regards

Mohammed Asik M

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If you want to ensure that all SSL inbound traffic is being inspected, then yes, you would want to consider having all certs on the FW.

There is always some impact with decryption, usually 10% hit in CPU utilization.  Depending on the size of the FW (better performance with larger sized models of FWs) you may be able to mitigate any CPU degradation or latency. 

What size FW are you working with (thinking PA5000 series FW, so please advise)

I have see companies invest in an appliance called an HSM (Hardware Security Module), that offloads all of the decryption functionality onto this appliance, so that it does the heavy math/CPU processing to decrypt/re-encrypt traffic.

[reaper]

The performance impact lies in the total volume of decrypted sessions, not the amount of certificates. Your platform will need to be scaled to acommodate this volume and taking into account decryption. 

if nearly all of your sessions are encrypted, it maybe be wise to consider one of the newer platforms (5200 series) with far superior decryption capabilities

@SteveCantwell 

the HSM serves as a vault, keeping all the private keys extra private (kinda like a password manager for firewalls)

it handles all ssl handshakes, but it does not take the brunt of the decryption processing, so performance gain is near negligable