How can I establish a secure connection to a websocket on localhost?

Question

We have an application which we run on a POS terminal, that should receive data from an application running on the same machine, while displaying content from a remote site which is loaded over HTTPS.

To receive the data from the local application, we want to use websockets, which is working fine so far. However, when the site we're displaying is loaded over HTTPS, the websocket connection is required to be encrypted as well.

Because we can't really get a proper certificate for localhost, we're just using a self-signed one. But Chrome won't connect to a websocket that uses a self-signed certificate.

How can we resolve this problem? We can't use an unencrypted websocket, we can't use a self-signed certificate for the encrypted one and we can't get a signed certificate for localhost. What option am I missing?

Did you already try this?http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7580508/getting-chrome-to-accept-self-signed-localhost-certificate — Joa Ebert, Sep 25 '14 at 11:33
@JoaEbert: I wanted to avoid manually installing certificates, if at all possible. — Oliver Salzburg, Sep 25 '14 at 11:41
@OliverSalzburg There is a flag in Chrome that could be relevant for this: chrome://flags/#allow-insecure-websocket-from-https-origin. It isn't really a permanent solution though. — gpgekko, Sep 25 '14 at 11:48
@VaughanHilts: See if this is helpful: http://superuser.com/questions/772762/how-can-i-disable-security-checks-for-localhost — Oliver Salzburg, Jun 02 '15 at 18:37

score 7 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 05 '14 at 03:16

7

If you have admin privileges on the POS terminals, how about adding a line to the HOSTS file like:

127.0.0.1 localhost.mycompany.com

Now you can use a real certificate for localhost.mycompany.com in the server application.

answered Oct 05 '14 at 03:16

dricket

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Just FYI, this is the way we've been going for quite some time now. We even skip `HOSTS` and have complete DNS zones dedicated to mapping names to `localhost`. – Oliver Salzburg May 12 '17 at 12:04

How can I establish a secure connection to a websocket on localhost?

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