Implementing HTTPS with Mule ESB

At one of my clients we use the Mule ESB (3.1) to communicate with the outside world. A big difference compared with having Mule running inside the company network is the security. One of the steps to make the communication more secure is to use HTTPS instead of HTTP. Other measures we took (signing the outgoing and validating the incoming SOAP requests) will be handled in another post.

Luckily with a tool as Mule ESB this is not a big issue. Simply define a HTTPS connector in your config and refer to that instead of the HTTP connector in your HTTP endpoints. The connector definition looks like this:

 <https:connector name="httpsConnector" clientSoTimeout="0" serverSoTimeout="0">
        <https:tls-client path="${my.ssl.keystore}" storePassword="${my.ssl.keystore.password}"/>
        <https:tls-key-store path="${my.ssl.keystore}"  storePassword="${my.ssl.keystore.password}" keyPassword="${my.ssl.keystore.password}"/>
        <https:tls-server path="${my.ssl.keystore}" storePassword="${my.ssl.keystore.password}"/> 
    </https:connector>

And your endpoints will become something like:

<flow name="my-secure-flow">
        <https:inbound-endpoint address="${my.incoming.url}" connector-ref="httpsConnector">
            ...
        </https:inbound-endpoint>
        <https:outbound-endpoint address="${my.internal.url}" connector-ref="httpsConnector">
            ...
        </https:outbound-endpoint>
    </flow>

By the way, all ‘${…}’ are translated to real values at deploy time. There is a nice article how to accomplish this.

However this is just the basic SSL setup. In our case the customer wanted to take it a step further and implement the mutual authentication which is explained nicely here. The question is if this is also doable with the Mule ESB. Although it took me a while to find out I ended up here in the Mule forum and it seems quite easy to accomplish. Just add the property requireClientAuthentication=”true” to the ‘tls-server’ and it is should be fixed.

 <https:connector name="httpsConnector" clientSoTimeout="0" serverSoTimeout="0">
        <https:tls-client path="${my.ssl.keystore}" storePassword="${my.ssl.keystore.password}"/>
        <https:tls-key-store path="${my.ssl.keystore}"  storePassword="${my.ssl.keystore.password}" keyPassword="${my.ssl.keystore.password}"/>
        <https:tls-server path="${my.ssl.keystore}" storePassword="${my.ssl.keystore.password}" requireClientAuthentication="true"/> 
    </https:connector>

We will test this of course but so far it is looking good.