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amazon-web-servicesamazon-elbsticky-session

AWS: Send certificate info from ELB to EC2


When Sticky Sessions are enabled on an AWS ELB it seems that the ELB will terminate SSL (AWS forum discussing this). I need information from the user's certificate to verify some things, so I need the ELB to forward this information to the EC2 instances.

How can I get the ELB to give me the user's certificate information? Is there a way to create custom headers? All I was able to find were these three headers: Amazon docs on x-forwarded-headers.

As discussed in the first link I posted another option is persistent sessions. Is this my only option?


Solution

  • ELB won't give you information regarding the certificate. And you cannot customize/add forwarded headers.

    If you need the client certificate, you'll need to use TCP forwarding rather than HTTP/HTTPS.

    This way, the ELB will simply forward the connection as-is on to the EC2 instance. It won't terminate the SSL connection, and you won't get sticky sessions.