I recently generated a self-signed cert to use with NGINX via it’s GUI.

  1. Generate cert and key
  2. Upload these via the GUI
  3. Apply to each Proxy Host

Now when I visit my internal sites (eg, jellyfin.home) I get a warning (because this cert is not signed by a trusted CA) but the connection is https.

My question is, does this mean that my connection is fully encrypted from my client (eg my laptop) to my server hosting Jellyfin? I understand that when I go to jellyfin.home, my PiHole resolves this to NGINX, then NGINX completes the connection to the IP:port it has configured and uses the cert it has assigned to this proxy host, but the Jellyfin server itself does not have any certs installed on it.

  • N0x0n
    2·
    5 days ago

    Heyia ! I battled a few weeks to get my own mini-ca to work in my own lan (green padlock, no warning) while a lot of people would argue that it doesn’t add much security wise and give a fault sense of protection, it still encrypts your communication in your LAN.

    Normally you will give NGNIX a “server” certificate, the one that will be tested against your rootCA installed on your computer/laptop for each service (or a wildcard domain cert).

    If you want to see if your communication is encrypted and secure, give wireshark a try and look if your communication is in plaintext or encrypted gibberish !

    Also If you want I got some good documentation on how to create your own mini-ca in your homelab !

    • root@lemmy.worldOP
      2·
      5 days ago

      Ah, I guess I might need to add my RootCA to my phone, laptop, pc huh? That would get rid of the untrusted warnings. Yes, please feel free to share if you have documentation!

      Update: I setup my own local CA and got it working. Thanks for the tip!

      • N0x0n
        1·
        5 days ago

        https://we.tl/t-JuecCJUxc0

        This is an extract from Demystifying Cryptography with OpenSSL 3.0 Discover the best techniques to enhance your network security with OpenSSL 3.0 ! It’s really a good read and helped me to make a secure and self-signed certificate environment. In this example though he uses the ED448 algorithm which won’t work on most browser (if any…).

        Last year when I followed this tutorial I also tried with EdDSA with Curve25519 but also here TLS wasn’t working and the certificate just got rejected by Firefox. See here ! It seems resolved though so you can give it a shot :).

        Else just fall down to RSA and longer keys. Why? Just to quote something else from the book:

        NIST curves are developed by NSA and standardized by NIST. Brainpool curves are proposed by the Brainpool workgroup, a group of cryptographers that were dissatisfied with NIST curves because NIST curves were not verifiably randomly generated, so they may have intentionally or accidentally weak security.

        Hope it helps :)