[Task 4] Dynamic Certificate Management

[thejhh]

Phase 4 of the gomiddleman development focuses on establishing Dynamic Certificate Management. This phase is pivotal for enhancing the proxy's flexibility and security by enabling on-the-fly certificate generation. The goal is to dynamically create certificates that mimic client certificates for secure backend communication, ensuring seamless trust and authentication in the mTLS ecosystem.

Goals

• Dynamic Certificate Generation #28
• Certificate Authority (CA) #29
• Attribute Mimicking #30
• Lifecycle Management for dynamic client certificates #31
• Secure Storage for Dynamic Certificates #32
• Configuration and Customization for Dynamic Certificate Management #33

Testing and Validation

• Functionality Tests: Validate the functionality of the dynamic certificate generation, ensuring certificates are correctly generated, signed, and accepted by backend servers.
• Attribute Accuracy Tests: Test the accuracy of attribute mimicking, verifying that the generated certificates faithfully replicate the necessary client certificate details.
• Security and Compliance Tests: Conduct security assessments to ensure that the certificate generation process adheres to best practices and compliance requirements, particularly regarding certificate authority trust and attribute handling.
• Performance Impact Analysis: Evaluate the impact of dynamic certificate management on the proxy's performance, focusing on generation speed, memory usage, and connection setup times.

Documentation

• Technical Documentation: Document the implementation details of the dynamic certificate management feature, including the CA setup, certificate generation logic, and attribute mimicking.
• Configuration Guide: Provide comprehensive guidelines on configuring the dynamic certificate management feature, including setting up the internal CA, defining certificate templates, and managing certificate lifecycles.
• Operational Guidelines: Outline operational best practices for managing dynamically generated certificates, including monitoring, renewing expired certificates, and handling revocation scenarios.

Phase 4 is critical for enabling advanced security scenarios where gomiddleman acts as a fully transparent and trusted intermediary in the mTLS communication chain. Feedback, suggestions, and contributions to this phase are highly encouraged to ensure a robust and secure implementation.