Are SSL certificates bound to the servers ip address?

Question

We have two different ldap providers in two different physical office locations. When I connect my laptop to one location and I 'retrieve from port' (in Websphere 6.1) to import the ssl cert of the ldap provider, I can authenticate to the respective ldap with no problems. If I take my laptop to the other office (that uses the other ldap provider by default) and I plugin my laptop, my WAS on my laptop will not start because it says 'no trusted ssl cert found'. If I 'retrieve from port' again and re import the cert then it works again. Note that my WAS always try to connect to one ldap, it simply has no use for the other one. If I go back to the other office I get the same error until I reimport from that location. The ldap connection point is ldap.something.com:636 and is pingable in both locations with the same FQDN. But when pinged it resolves to a different ip address in each office location. Why do I see that behavior? Are SSL Certs somehow bound to a specific IP address? If yes, then I need to maintain a different set of certs for each office location, right? Note that, there is no way to adjust the dns servers to resolve the hostname to the same IP address, I checked.

Can someone provide some insight?

Answer 1

Most SSL certificates are bound to the hostname of the machine and not the ip address.

You might get a better answer if you ask this question on serverfault.com

Answer 2

The SSL certificates are going to be bound to hostname rather than IP if they are setup in the standard way. Hence why it works at one site rather than the other.

Even if the servers share the same hostname they may well have two different certificates and hence WebSphere will have a certificate trust issue as it won't be able to recognise the certificate on the second server as it is different to the first.

Answer 3

SSL certificates are bound to a 'common name', which is usually a fully qualified domain name but can be a wildcard name (eg. *.domain.com) or even an IP address, but it usually isn't.

In your case, you are accessing your LDAP server by a hostname and it sounds like your two LDAP servers have different SSL certificates installed. Are you able to view (or download and view) the details of the SSL certificate? Each SSL certificate will have a unique serial numbers and fingerprint which will need to match. I assume the certificate is being rejected as these details don't match with what's in your certificate store.

Your solution will be to ensure that both LDAP servers have the same SSL certificate installed.

BTW - you can normally override DNS entries on your workstation by editing a local 'hosts' file, but I wouldn't recommend this.