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Ghostunnel

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👻

Ghostunnel is a simple TLS proxy with mutual authentication support for securing non-TLS backend applications.

Ghostunnel supports two modes, client mode and server mode. Ghostunnel in server mode runs in front of a backend server and accepts TLS-secured connections, which are then proxied to the (insecure) backend. A backend can be a TCP domain/port or a UNIX domain socket. Ghostunnel in client mode accepts (insecure) connections through a TCP or UNIX domain socket and proxies them to a TLS-secured service. In other words, ghostunnel is a replacement for stunnel.

Supported platforms: Ghostunnel is developed primarily for Linux on x86-64 platforms, although it should run on any UNIX system that exposes SO_REUSEPORT, including Darwin (macOS), FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. Ghostunnel also supports running on Windows, though with a reduced feature set. We recommend running on x86-64 to benefit from constant-time implementations of cryptographic algorithms that are not available on other platforms.

See ghostunnel --help, ghostunnel server --help and ghostunnel client --help.

Features

Access control: Ghostunnel enforces mutual authentication by requiring a valid client certificate for all connections. We also support access control via checks on the subject (or subject alternative names) of a client certificate. This is useful for restricting access to services that don't have native access control.

Certificate hotswapping: Ghostunnel can reload certificates at runtime without dropping existing connections. To trigger a reload, simply send SIGUSR1 to the process (or set a time-based reloading interval). This will cause ghostunnel to reload the keystore files. Once successful, the reloaded certificate will be used for new connections going forward.

Monitoring and metrics: Ghostunnel has a built-in status feature that can be used to collect metrics and monitor a running instance. Metrics can be fed into Graphite (or other systems) to see number of open connections, rate of new connections, connection lifetimes, timeouts, and other info.

Emphasis on security: We have put some thought into making ghostunnel secure by default and prevent accidental misconfiguration. For example, we always negotiate TLS v1.2 and only use safe cipher suites. Ghostunnel also supports PKCS#11 which makes it possible to use Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) to protect private keys.

Getting Started

To get started and play around with the implementation, you will need to generate some test certificates. If you want to bootstrap a full PKI, one good way to get started is to use a package like square/certstrap. If you only need some test certificates for playing around with the tunnel, you can find some pre-generated ones in the test-keys directory (alongside instructions on how to generate new ones with OpenSSL).

Install

Ghostunnel is available through GitHub releases and through Docker Hub.

Binaries can be built from source as follows (cross-compile requires Docker and xgo):

# Compile for local architecture
make ghostunnel

# Cross-compile release binaries
make -f Makefile.dist dist

Note that ghostunnel requires Go 1.10 or later to build, and CGO is required for PKCS#11 support. See also CROSS-COMPILE.md for instructions on how to cross-compile a custom build with CGO enabled.

Develop

Ghostunnel has an extensive suite of integration tests. Our integration test suite requires Python 3.5 (or later) and gocovmerge to run. We use gvt for managing vendored dependencies.

To run tests:

# Option 1: run unit & integration tests locally
make test

# Option 2: run unit & integration tests in a Docker container
GO_VERSION=1.10 make docker-test

# Open coverage information in browser
go tool cover -html coverage-merged.out

For more information on how to contribute, please see the CONTRIBUTING file.

Usage Examples

Below are some common usage examples. By default, ghostunnel logs to stderr and runs in the foreground. You can set --syslog to log to syslog. For daemonizing or running ghostunnel inside a container, we recommend daemonize or dumb-init.

Note that the examples below use PKCS#12 keystores, but ghostunnel also accepts PEM files with the certificate chain and private key if you prefer. Just pass a PEM file as an argument to the --keystore flag, ghostunnel will automatically detect the file format and handle it appropriately. We require that the certificate chain and private key are both present in the PEM file, except if PKCS#11 is used (see PKCS#11 examples further down for more info).

Server mode

This is an example for how to launch ghostunnel in server mode, listening for incoming TLS connections on localhost:8443 and forwarding them to localhost:8080.

To set allowed clients, you must specify at least one of --allow-all, --allow-cn, --allow-ou, --allow-dns-san, or --allow-ip-san. It's possible to use these together or to specify them repeatedly to allow multiple clients. In this example, we assume that the CN of the client cert we want to accept connections from is client.

Start a backend server:

nc -l localhost 8080

Start a ghostunnel in server mode to proxy connections:

ghostunnel server \
    --listen localhost:8443 \
    --target localhost:8080 \
    --keystore test-keys/server.p12 \
    --cacert test-keys/root.crt \
    --allow-cn client

Verify that clients can connect with their client certificate:

openssl s_client \
    -connect localhost:8443 \
    -cert test-keys/client.crt \
    -key test-keys/client.key \
    -CAfile test-keys/root.crt

Now we have a TLS proxy running for our backend service. We terminate TLS in ghostunnel and forward the connections to the insecure backend.

Client mode

This is an example for how to launch ghostunnel in client mode, listening on localhost:8080 and proxying requests to a TLS server on localhost:8443.

Start a backend TLS server:

openssl s_server \
    -accept 8443 \
    -cert test-keys/server.crt \
    -key test-keys/server.key \
    -CAfile test-keys/root.crt

Start a ghostunnel with a client certificate to forward connections:

ghostunnel client \
    --listen localhost:8080 \
    --target localhost:8443 \
    --keystore test-keys/client.p12 \
    --cacert test-keys/root.crt

Verify that we can connect to 8080:

nc -v localhost 8080

Now we have a TLS proxy running for our client. We take the insecure local connection, wrap them in TLS, and forward them to the secure backend.

Full tunnel (client plus server)

We can combine the above two examples to get a full tunnel. Note that you can start the ghostunnels in either order.

Start netcat on port 8001:

nc -l localhost 8001

Start the ghostunnel server:

ghostunnel server \
    --listen localhost:8002 \
    --target localhost:8001 \
    --keystore test-keys/server.p12 \
    --cacert test-keys/root.crt \
    --allow-cn client

Start the ghostunnel client:

ghostunnel client \
    --listen localhost:8003 \
    --target localhost:8002 \
    --keystore test-keys/client.p12 \
    --cacert test-keys/root.crt

Verify that we can connect to 8003:

nc -v localhost 8003

Now we have a full tunnel running. We take insecure client connections, forward them to the server side of the tunnel via TLS, and finally terminate and proxy the connection to the insecure backend.

Advanced Features

Metrics & profiling

Ghostunnel has a notion of "status port", a TCP port (or UNIX socket) that can be used to expose status and metrics information over HTTPS. The status port feature can be controlled via the --status flag. Profiling endpoints on the status port can be enabled with --enable-pprof.

The X.509 certificate on the status port will be the same as the certificate used for proxying (either the client or server certificate). This means you can use the status port to inspect/verify the certificate that is being used, which can be useful for orchestration systems.

Example invocation with status port enabled:

ghostunnel client \
    --listen localhost:8080 \
    --target localhost:8443 \
    --keystore test-keys/client.p12 \
    --cacert test-keys/root.crt \
    --status localhost:6060

Note that we set the status port to "localhost:6060". Ghostunnel will start an internal HTTPS server and listen for connections on the given host/port. You can also specify a UNIX socket instead of a TCP port.

How to check status and read connection metrics:

# Status information (produces JSON output)
curl --cacert test-keys/root.crt https://localhost:6060/_status

# Metrics information (produces JSON output)
curl --cacert test-keys/root.crt https://localhost:6060/_metrics

How to use profiling endpoints, if --enable-pprof is set:

# Human-readable goroutine dump
curl --cacert test-keys/root.crt 'https://localhost:6060/debug/pprof/goroutine?debug=1'

# Analyze execution trace using pprof tool
go tool pprof -seconds 5 https+insecure://localhost:6060/debug/pprof/profile

Note that go tool pprof does not support setting CA certificates at the moment, hence the use of the https+insecure scheme in the last example. You can use the standard https scheme if your ghostunnel is using a certificate trusted by your system (c.f. golang/go#20939). For more information on profiling via pprof, see the runtime/pprof and net/http/pprof docs.

HSM/PKCS#11 support

Ghostunnel has support for loading private keys from PKCS#11 modules, which should work with any hardware security module that exposes a PKCS#11 interface. An easy way to test the PKCS#11 interface for development purposes is with SoftHSM. Note that CGO is required in order for PKCS#11 support to work (see CROSS-COMPILE.md for instructions to cross-compile with CGO enabled).

To import the server test key into SoftHSM, for example:

softhsm2-util --init-token \
  --slot 0 \
  --label ghostunnel-server \
  --so-pin 1234 \
  --pin 1234

softhsm2-util --id 01 \
  --token ghostunnel-server \
  --label ghostunnel-server \
  --import test-keys/server.pkcs8.key \
  --so-pin 1234 \
  --pin 1234

To launch ghostunnel with the SoftHSM-backed PKCS11 key (on macOS):

ghostunnel server \
  --keystore test-keys/server.crt \
  --pkcs11-module /usr/local/Cellar/softhsm/2.3.0/lib/softhsm/libsofthsm2.so \
  --pkcs11-token-label ghostunnel-server \
  --pkcs11-pin 1234 \
  --listen localhost:8443 \
  --target localhost:8080 \
  --allow-cn client

Note that --keystore needs to point to the certificate chain that corresponds to the private key in the PKCS#11 module, with the leaf certificate being the first certificate in the chain. The --pkcs11-module, --pkcs11-token-label and --pkcs11-pin flags can be used to configure how to load the key from the PKCS11 module you are using. It's also possible to use environment variables to set PKCS11 options instead of flags (via PKCS11_MODULE, PKCS11_TOKEN_LABEL and PKCS11_PIN).