How do you secure application links if you try to bypass a proxy?

[Wayne Wylupski]

Following https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/KB/How+to+bypass+a+reverse+proxy+or+SSL+in+Application+Links, it seems the approach, creating a new connector for just application links is not secure; people could make requests against that port.

What is the recommendation for securing the new connector and only assure it will be used for application links, perhaps only from specified soures?  Would it be to configured it to use SSL?  Configure it to use a special truststore?  And what would need to done to the 'other' application to assure the security of the transport layer?

Thank you.

[rrudnicki]

Hi Wayne, 

When working with Application Links, it may be necessary to bypass any existing reverse proxy or SSL configuration, without disrupting normal usage for your instances. You may also wish to use this process to bypass a proxy during the troubleshooting process.

Since SSL is used to cryptograph a connection, we encourage the users to use that always as they can. The documentation you've mentioned as you can see mention that you should use HTTP for tests purposes or in case you are facing some specific issue related to SSL and Application Links. 

You can force JIRA to only accept HTTPS connections. Please check this link on step 5:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jira/running-jira-over-ssl-or-https-124008.html#RunningJIRAoverSSLorHTTPS-Advancedconfiguration

Cheers, 

Renato Rudnicki

[Wayne Wylupski]

Yes, but how do you assure that the second connector will ONLY be used for application links? How do you prevent users from using that connector?

[rrudnicki]

Well, actually you cannot. But here a workaround that could work: Add a firewall rule allowing only the communication on HTTP protocol only among the applications address which are using the application links. Not sure if this will work, but definitely isn't elegant.