Letsencrypt Wildcard SSL Cert

Introduction

The time has come when we need to have SSL certs that can be used unrepentantly of Cloudflare. Cloudflare's proxy for webservers does work well but on the free tier they only listen to 443 and anything else will be rejected and return an invalid response. For some services like VPN (either OpenVPN or Wireguard) it does not matter as they will do their own encryption. However, services like Jellyfin use alternate ports for both http and https traffic so cannot be proxied by Cloudflare, to date it has not really mattered because streaming to remote locations is not really required too much and if it is we can use a VPN link if privacy is an issue. It would be nice to do Jellyfin over https but not really required. Enter N8N, it also works on non standard ports and does have a SSL engine that should work with Cloudflare but it does not appear to be as easy to setup as first thought and any outside access will certainly need to be secured.

Acquire the Wildcard SSL Certificate and key from Letsencrypt

Initial features to be recognised

The requirement is to have one key and certificate pair for the entire *.seaoffate.net and seaoffate.net DNS name. First it should be noted that the wildcard SSL cert will only cover one subdomain deep IE it will be ok for wiki.seaoffate.net or files.seaoffate.net but it will not be any good for any deeper like other.wiki.seaoffate.net. If any deeper nesting of DNS subdomain names is required they will have to be on a separate request. It is not likely to be much of a problem for seaoffate.net but in a business setting it could be an issue.

The next thing to be considered is that the certs will only be valid for a set period of time then they will expire, they would still do the encryption but would return errors to the browser due to the expiry date, the solution is to have a bot retrieve new certificates before the old cert expires and indeed there are Certbots especially setup for this purpose.

Another feature that will have to be addressed is that Letsencrypt will need to verify that seaoffate is really being hosted at the correct address. If it was just a one off cert then there is a process where the request is made to Letsencrypt through a Certbot and Letsencrypt return a string that needs to be added to the DNS provider, in this case Cloudflare, and as the text file is published along with the rest of the DNS information Letsencrypt can be sure that the user is indeed the owner of the domain (several text strings may need to be published for verification). This manual process is not too difficult or even time consuming but it is a manual process so it would be better if it can be automated. Fortunately and unsurprisingly, Cloudflare have a solution to the automating domain ownership problem in the form of API keys. Obviously it would be better if the API keys were kept private as any leak would allow a hostile actor to impersonate my websites forever.

This will be a wildcard certificate so it can be used by anything.seaoffate.net and as many times as required. It could be copied to all of the webservers and used in place of the existing Cloudflare origin cert (cloudflare full strict only requires that it be a cert that cloudflare can recognise and as this will be a public cert it will work), this would make the warnings when using webservers directly disappear but it is not certain that this is even desired let alone required.