Protecting external communication with HTTPS

In this section, we will learn how to prevent eavesdropping on external communication, for example, from the internet, via the public APIs exposed by the edge server. We will use HTTPS to encrypt communication. Under the hood, HTTPS uses the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol to encrypt communication. SSL is a protocol that provides privacy, authentication, and data integrity in communications. Over time, SSL was succeeded by its more secure and modern counterpart, Transport Layer Security (TLS).

To use HTTPS, we need to do the following:

• Create a certificate: We will create our own self-signed certificate, sufficient for development purposes
• Configure the edge server: It has to be configured to accept only HTTPS-based external traffic using the certificate

The self-signed certificate is created with the following command:

keytool -genkeypair -alias localhost -keyalg RSA -keysize 2048 -storetype PKCS12...