WebLogic: The Definitive Guide

Configuring WebLogic’s SSL

There are three steps to configuring WebLogic’s SSL:

1. You need to establish the server’s identity, by acquiring a private key and digital certificate for the server. You can either use demonstration keys and certificates supplied with WebLogic or generate your own. Alternatively, you can contact a reputed CA for production-quality certificates. You also need to establish trust for the server. This requires you to configure WebLogic with a keystore that holds the certificates of all the CAs that the server is willing to trust.

2. Once you obtain the server’s key and certificate, you need to store them in a keystore^[1] before they can be made available to WebLogic.

3. Finally, you need to fire up the Administration Console and point the server to the appropriate keystore files.

Once you configure the required SSL resources for WebLogic, you need to enable the SSL port. By default, SSL is not enabled for WebLogic because it consumes additional CPU resources when it has to service SSL connection requests. Thus, before you connect to the SSL-enabled port, you must weigh the benefits of secure TCP connections over the overhead of additional CPU processing. Yet secure SSL communication is mandatory in many scenarios. For instance, as we saw in Chapter 13, the Administration Channel requires you to configure SSL support for all servers in the WebLogic domain. In a production environment, SSL connections are essential to protecting access to sensitive application services. ...