How to change the certificate used by the Qlik Sense Proxy to a custom third party certificate

[Bjorn_Wedbratt]

Content:

• About
• What is the current certificate used for?
• Certificate options, or: What type of certificate is right for me?
• Requirements, or: What to look out for when getting your cert.
• Where to get a certificate and how to do a CSR?
• Importing the Certificate
• The 5 Install Steps
• Step 1: Getting Started
• Step 2: Import the certificate
• Longer Step 2 (manual import):
• Step 3:Getting the Thumbprint
• Step 4:Configuring the Qlik Sense Proxy
• Step 5:Verification, or: How to prove the certificate was accepted.
• Related Content:

If you’ve just installed Qlik Sense Enterprise, then this image probably looks familiar. Alternatively, Chrome might display The site's security certificate is not trusted, while Firefox may report This Connection is Untrusted.

By default, Qlik Sense uses a self-signed certificate to enable HTTPS access across both the Hub (https:// YourSenseServer/hub) and the Management Console (https://YourSenseServer/qmc). But self-signed certificates cannot be validated or trusted by web browsers and tend to prompt a warning message.

To establish a secure HTTPS connection, the browser must trust the SSL/TLS certificate installed on the server. In the case of self-signed certificates, the signing Certificate Authority is not trusted, hence no certificates generated by the CA are trusted.

To install a trusted certificate for use with the Qlik Sense Enterprise on Windows Hub and Management Console, we need:

1. An additional (signed) certificate.
2. A brief (5 minute) downtime of the Qlik Sense Proxy.

These instructions are for replacing the certificate used for accessing the Qlik Sense Hub and Management Console. The certificate used for service communication cannot be replaced.

For video Transcript click here

About

What is the current certificate used for?

During the initial install, the Qlik Sense Repository Service creates a set of certificates. Their purpose is to secure Service Communication and Service Authentication.

Qlik Sense uses certificates to authenticate its service across all nodes. See the Qlik Sense Online Help for details. In addition, other products (such as Qlik NPrinting) require these certificates to be establish a connection.

This self signed certificate is then also used to secure hub and Management Console access through HTTPS.

We will not modify, replace, or remove the originally created certificates. Doing so will break service communication. 

What we’ll do instead is to add an additional one.

Certificate options, or: What type of certificate is right for me?

There are three possible types of certificates for us to use.

• A certificate purchased from and signed by a trusted CA (Certificate Authority) such as VeriSign, Thawte, Geotrust, etc.
• A certificate provided and signed by your own Enterprise CA (Certificate Authority).
• And, of course, a self-signed one. Those can be created by any number of applications, such as Microsoft IIS, but is generally only recommended for test environments. More so, it has the potential side effect of teaching users to ignore browser warnings, which we do not want.
  
  

Requirements, or: What to look out for when getting your cert.

• The certificate must follow these requirements: Qlik Sense Enterprise on Windows: Compatibility information for third-party SSL certificates to use ... 
• The certificate itself must contain a private key
• Has an up to date valid from / valid to date range
• Is signed by a valid and OS or browser configured Certificate Authority

When support gets questions, they are most often related to a certificate missing the private key. Always verify the certificate comes bundled with one when you install it.

It’ll look like this:

Where to get a certificate and how to do a CSR?

The Certificate Authority you chose will have instructions for this, and if you are looking to get a self-signed one or one from your corporation's CA, then a local administrator can provide the certificate to you.

Either way, you are going to need to generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) to pass on to your CA. There are tools out there to get that done with, such as certreq from Microsoft (found here), and SSLhopper has a great article on that, which I often send to customers when they ask us about CSRs and how to do them.

Once you obtain the certificate, we'll move on to installing it and activating it in Qlik Sense. This will be done in three quick steps:

• Import
• Get the Thumbprint
• Provide Thumbprint to the Proxy
  
  

Importing the Certificate

As mentioned before, we are not replacing certificates. The already existing ones will not be deleted. Doing so would break service authentication between the individual Qlik Sense services and render the system… broken.

The 5 Install Steps

Step 1: Getting Started

On the Qlik Sense node running the Qlik Sense Proxy, log on with the user running the Sense services. This is important since the certificate needs to be accessible for this account.

Step 2: Import the certificate

If the certificate was saved in the .pfx format, then all you need to do is double click the file. Follow the prompt to import the certificate into the Personal store.

Longer Step 2 (manual import):

If you want to import it manually or verify if it was correctly installed:

1. Launch the Microsoft Management Console (mmc.exe) on the Proxy node
2. In the MMC, go to File > Add / Remove Snap-in...
3. Select Certificates and click Add
4. Select Computer account, click Next, select Local computer and click Finish
   
   
   
   
5. In the MMC, go to Certificates (Local Computer)/Personal
6. In the MMC, go to Actions > All Tasks > Import...
7. Browse to the certificate file provided to you from your CA
8. Follow the instructions on the screen to import the certificate, including the private key
9. Verify the new certificate has been imported into Certificates (Local Computer) > Personal > Certificates and that it contains a private key
10. Double-click the Certificate > Certification Path and confirm it shows "This certificate is OK"
    
    

Step 3: Getting the Thumbprint

Well, since we are already in the MMC, let's open the freshly installed certificate again.

1. Switch to the Details tab and scroll down until you find Thumbprint
2. Mark the entire thing and copy it into, for example, Notepad.

 

Step 4: Configuring the Qlik Sense Proxy

Almost done!

1. Open the Qlik Sense Management Console (QMC)
2. Go to Proxies
3. Double click the Proxy you want to use (or select and choose Edit)
4. Enable the Security options in the Properties panel on the right
5. Paste the certificate Thumbprint into the SSL browser certificate thumbprint text box.

Click Apply.

The Sense Proxy will now restart. During the restart, it will be using Windows API calls to correctly bind the new certificate to its SSL ports.

Step 5: Verification, or: How to prove the certificate was accepted.

In the web browser:

When opening the Qlik Sense Hub or QMC, the certificate will now be displayed in the browser. This may look different depending on the web browser, but in Google Chrome you can click the padlock to the left of the URL to verify what certificate is used.

The information displayed needs to match the properties of the certificate you installed.

In the log files:

If you’d rather see what the Qlik Sense Proxy service is doing, then you can directly check up on that, too.

On the Proxy node, go to C:\ProgramData\Qlik\Sense\Log\Proxy\Trace and open the Security log file from just after the last start.

It will now print a slightly different message than before:

Security.Proxy.Qlik.Sense.Common.Security.Cryptography.LoggingDigester    DOMAIN\_service    Setting crypto key for log file secure signing: success

Security.Proxy.Qlik.Sense.Common.Security.Cryptography.SecretsKey    DOMAIN\_service    retrieving symmetric key from cert: success   

Security.Proxy.Qlik.Sense.Common.Security.Cryptography.CryptoKey    DOMAIN\_service    setting crypto key: success   

Security.Proxy.Qlik.Sense.Communication.Security.CertSetup    'CN=localhost' (08C871933A58E072FED7AD65E2DB6D5AD3EAF9FA) as SSL certificate presented to browser, which is a 3rd party SSL certificate  

And that's it!

There isn't much more to it in a standard Qlik Sense Enterprise installation, but if you have more questions, then maybe a few of these articles can help:

Receiving Bad Request 400?

Make sure the URL/FQDN you are using to access the Hub and QMC is correctly added to the WebSocket Allow List: How to configure the WebSocket origin allow list and best practices  

I applied my certificate and it seems to be using it correctly, but browsers are still saying the Common Name is Invalid?

ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID when using 3rd party certificate 

Qlik Sense keeps reverting to the default and complains it can't find a valid ssl certificate with the thumbprint.

Qlik Sense: Couldn't find a valid ssl certificate with thumbprint in Proxy logs, the third party cer... 

The certificate may not have a Private key or the service account does not have access to it.

How to: Manage Certificate Private Key 

The Qlik Sense Service account doesn't have admin privileges and the certificate is not accepted.

How to: Change the Qlik Sense Proxy certificate if the service account does not have local administr... 

Related Content:

• Qlik Sense Hub and QMC with custom SSL certificate 
• A certificate error or warning is displayed in the browser when accessing the Qlik Sense Hub or Mana... 
• Qlik Sense - Changing to a signed server proxy certificate 
• Qlik Sense - Changing a proxy certificate 
• ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID when using 3rd party certificate
• Qlik Sense: Compatibility information for third-party SSL certificates to use with HUB/QMC
• Requirements for configuring Qlik Sense with SSL
• Couldn't find a valid ssl certificate with thumbprint and the incorrect certificate used on hub 
• How to: Change the Qlik Sense Proxy certificate if the service account does not have local administr...
• NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID 

[Sonja_Bauernfeind]

Hello @bmenicucci 

Qlik Sense does not come with a web server that allows you to host a file in a custom folder structure like this. If you require a web server to host a file, we would need to recommend a third party web server, such as IIS.

I would suggest connecting with the customer support of the org where you are attempting to purchase the certificate from, as they should be able to provide you with information on this.

All the best,
Sonja 

[bmenicucci]

Hi Sonja,
thank you for the quick answer.
May I ask you if it's possible to have an IIS web server and Qlik Sense one
together?
Any possibility to disrupt activities?
Thanks,
Brunello

[Sonja_Bauernfeind]

Hello @bmenicucci 

We cannot recommend having it installed on the same server (while in production). You are likely to run into port conflicts. But if this validation is only required once, you can shut down the Qlik Sense services during a maintenance window, set up IIS, do your validation, and then uninstall/disable IIS to return to the normal Qlik Sense operation.

But as I mentioned: This is something you'd want to check with the vendor you are trying to purchase the certificate from. 

All the best,
Sonja 

[Ken_T]

Does anything have to be done to VIRTUAL PROXIES, after a new certificate is set up?

[Sonja_Bauernfeind]

@Ken_T 

The only changes necessary when swapping to a 3rd party certificate are outlined in this guide. No modifications need to be done to the Virtual Proxy. All Virtual Proxies using the Proxy the cert is configured for will use this cert.

All the best,
Sonja 

[Ken_T]

@Sonja_Bauernfeind we had to generate SP Metadata for all of our virtual proxies which had been individually configured with SAML authentication, after we updated our certificate. Had to send these new files to our team that handles SAML, and they had to do some updates with those files before our virtual proxies that had specific/different SAML set up started working again. This was on our QAP system where several virtual proxies are set up to have different SAML authentication. 

[Ken_T]

ps, this article helped us get it all working !

[Sonja_Bauernfeind]

Hello @Ken_T !

I am glad the article helped!  And based on what you explained here: Yeah, alright, I only considered out of the box (going directly to the hub) in my reply and did not take into consideration possible customizations that rely on certificates. That's a very good point! Thank you for bringing it up and leaving the note here.

All the best,
Sonja 

[gdrabla]

@Sonja_Bauernfeind @Andre_Sostizzo   - 

Our vulnerability Scanning Team scanning our servers with -

• Vulnerabilities - "Untrusted TLS/SSL server X.509 certificate".
• Vulnerability Proof - TLS/SSL certificate signed by unknown, untrusted CA: CN=<hostname>-CA -- [Path does not chain with any of the trust anchors].
• Port & Process Details as below -

Server Name	Port	Process	Process Description Name	Location
Scheduler Node	443	proxy.exe	Qlik Sense Proxy Service	C:\Program Files\Qlik\Sense\Proxy
Proxy Node Scheduler Node  Engine Node 1 Engine Node 2	4242	ntoskrnl.exe	NT Kernel & System	C:\Windows\System32
	5926	dotnet.exe	.NET Core Host	C:\Program Files\Qlik\Sense\ServiceDispatcher\dotnet
	5927	dotnet.exe	.NET Core Host	C:\Program Files\Qlik\Sense\ServiceDispatcher\dotnet

• Root Cause known - Issue occurring due to self signed certificate installed on all nodes.
• Background:  We recently got signed Custom third party certificate (contains all nodes SANs)  imported in Proxy Node. Architecture as below -
• Question #1 - Which Proxy choose Central or Proxy for updating Thumbprint?

• Question # 2 - Once we complete the Step 4 in this article, will post Sense Proxy restart distribute the new certificate to Central/Scheduler Node, other Engine nodes and Windows API calls will correctly bind the new certificate to its SSL ports on same ?.
• Question # 3 -if this document doesn't applies to this problem, can you please provide details Steps of replacing Self Signed Certificate with Custom 3rd party certificate - goal here is to replace existing self signed cert with 3rd party cert on all required nodes?
• Architecture Here -

[Sonja_Bauernfeind]

Hello @gdrabla 

It looks like you are attempting to change the service communication certificate. This is not currently possible; Qlik Sense can only operate with its own certificate.

This article documents how to change the certificate used on the hub and management console; so the certificate seen in the browser when users access either. 

So, to answer your questions in turn:

• Question #1 - Which Proxy choose Central or Proxy for updating Thumbprint?
  
  If you still wish to change the certificate used for hub and qmc access, choose the proxy which is hosting your users. 
  
  
• Question # 2 - Once we complete the Step 4 in this article, will post Sense Proxy restart distribute the new certificate to Central/Scheduler Node, other Engine nodes and Windows API calls will correctly bind the new certificate to its SSL ports on same ?.
  
  This is not possible, the certificate used by the services is not changed and cannot be changed.
  
  
• Question # 3 -if this document doesn't applies to this problem, can you please provide details Steps of replacing Self Signed Certificate with Custom 3rd party certificate - goal here is to replace existing self signed cert with 3rd party cert on all required nodes?
  
  This is not possible.
  
  The existing self-signed certificate is secure. The warning is displayed because the web browser (or your scanning too) does not have enough information to decide whether or not the certificate is secure as it does not know the CA that signed it. 
  
  You can likely speak to your network and admin team to ensure our CA is considered trusted.