Production postmortemThe self signed certificate that couldn’t

time to read 3 min | 434 words

RavenDB makes extensive use of certificates for authentication and encryption. They allow us to safely communicate between distributed instances without worrying about a man in the middle or eavesdroppers. Given the choices we had to implement authentication, I’m really happy with the results of choosing certificates as the foundation of our authentication infrastructure.

It would be too good, however, to expect to have no issues with certificates. The topic of this point is a puzzler. A user has chosen to use a self signed certificate for the nodes in the cluster, but was unable to authenticate between the servers unless they registered the certificate in the OS’ store.

That sounds reasonable, right? If this is a self signed certificate, we obviously don’t trust it, so we need this extra step to ensure that we do trust it. However, we designed RavenDB specifically to avoid this step. If you are using a self signed certificate, the server will trust its own certificate, and thus will trust anyone that is using the same certificate.

In this case, however, that wasn’t happening. For some reason, the code path that we use to ensure that we trust our own certificate was not being activated, and that was a puzzler indeed.

One of the things that RavenDB does on first startup is to try to connect to itself as a client. It checks whatever it is successful or not. If not, we’ll try again, ignoring the registered root CAs. If we are successful at that point, we know what the issue here and ensure that we ignore the untrusted signer on the certificate. We only enable this code path if by default we don’t trust our own certificate.

Looking at the logs, we could see that we got a failure when talking to ourselves, some sort of a device not ready issue. That was strange. We hooked strace to look into what was going on, but there was nothing that was wrong at the sys call level. Then we looked into what was going on and realized that the issue was that the server’s was configured to use: https://ravendb-1.francecentral.cloudapp.azure.com/ but was actually hosted on https://ravendb-1-tst.francecentral.cloudapp.azure.com/

Do you see the difference?

The server was try to contact itself using the configured hostname. It failed, because of a DNS issue, so it couldn’t contact itself to figure out that the certificate was invalid. At that point, it didn’t install the hook and wouldn’t trust the self signed certificate.

So the issue started with investigating why we nodes in the cluster don’t trust each other with self signed certificate and got resolved by a simple configuration error.

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  16. (22 Apr 2022) The encrypted database that was too big to replicate
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  18. (03 Jan 2022) An error on the first act will lead to data corruption on the second act…
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  20. (17 Sep 2021) The Guinness record for page faults & high CPU
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  22. (23 Mar 2020) high CPU when there is little work to be done
  23. (21 Feb 2020) The self signed certificate that couldn’t
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  25. (07 Jun 2019) Printer out of paper and the RavenDB hang
  26. (18 Feb 2019) This data corruption bug requires 3 simultaneous race conditions
  27. (25 Dec 2018) Handled errors and the curse of recursive error handling
  28. (23 Nov 2018) The ARM is killing me
  29. (22 Feb 2018) The unavailable Linux server
  30. (06 Dec 2017) data corruption, a view from INSIDE the sausage
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  32. (07 Aug 2017) 30% boost with a single line change
  33. (04 Aug 2017) The case of 99.99% percentile
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  35. (23 Aug 2016) The insidious cost of managed memory
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  39. (21 Oct 2015) The case of the slow index rebuild
  40. (22 Sep 2015) The case of the Unicode Poo
  41. (03 Sep 2015) The industry at large
  42. (01 Sep 2015) The case of the lying configuration file
  43. (31 Aug 2015) The case of the memory eater and high load
  44. (14 Aug 2015) The case of the man in the middle
  45. (05 Aug 2015) Reading the errors
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