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Imagine for a moment a primary tomcat server that is exposed to the outside world. Imagine further that below this tomcat server are 1 to "N" tomcat servers that are NOT exposed to the outside world. These tomcat servers respond to serialized object requests from the primary. We will use the words primary and secondaries.

The secondaries (I hope) do NOT need to use login names and passwords.

Is it possible to configure the secondaries such that they allow only https connections from the trusted primary (a trusted certificate?)?

No users will ever access a web page on the secondaries, and if they do try to do so, they will be redirected to an error page.

-- More Details --

This is a legacy system that serializes POJOs from the Master/Top tomcat server to "Worker" tomcat servers (No framework / standard is followed). The "Worker" tomcat servers currently utilize a SSO (JOSSO in this case) which isn't needed. At one point in the past these "Worker" tomcats provided web pages and required authentication. That isn't the case anymore.

I wish to remove from the Worker tomcats the SSO agents and make life much easier for us when we upgrade the systems. Some of the deployed systems are vast and it takes weeks to upgrade all of the tomcat Workers. Image the headache of trying to get different tomcats to all play nice with different versions of SSO?

Since these Worker tomcat servers are not exposed to the outside world, it is my hope that I can establish some form of trusted connection between the Master tomcat and any-one of the Worker tomcat servers such that it doesn't require user level credentials. I hope that this can be setup such that a hacker who is sitting within the customer network will find it a challenge to connect to the Worker tomcats.

In the end I'm lacking the experience of making a trusted connection between tomcat A and tomcat B such that user credentials are not used.

Any advice on how to research that topic or if it is even possible is appreciated.

gavioto
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D-Klotz
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  • is this some kind of a home-grown webservice-cluster? Do you want your primary and secondary servers to communicate through https only? Do you want your primary to be authenticated through https (e.g. client-certificate) or not authenticated at all? If you require no authentication from your primary tomcat, how will you determine that somebody else (unauthenticated) accesses secondary so that they "will be redirected to an error page"? Also, what's your implementation? If you don't implement any user-identity based permission checks, of course you don't need to login – Olaf Kock Sep 12 '13 at 14:22
  • The first version of my question had a really long winded explanation but I feared I would scare away all those who couldn't read more than two three sentences. Let me edit and add to the question. – D-Klotz Sep 12 '13 at 17:48
  • Https only would be fine as long as a hacker who is within the customer network couldn't easily connect via this https. The primary server will probably keep using a SSO so it can play nice with other exposed services the company provides. This is currently tomcat 5.5, but I'm going to upgrade them to TomEE+. Did I answer everything? Thanks for your help. – D-Klotz Sep 12 '13 at 18:29

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