SSL on Tomcat connection pool

Question

I have done a lot of searches, but still can't find a solution.

In my projects, I'm using both Tomcat connection pooling and C3P0 connection pooling for postgresql. I rejected to use JDBC connection pooling because it's not suggested by postgresql officially.

Now I need to enable SSL/TLS on these pools. I thought this should be a pretty common need. I found examples on JDBC pooling, but not for tomcat or c3p0. I'm really wondering if tomcat and c3p0 poolings can configure SSL!

Does anyone have any resources on this topic that I can refer to?

Answer 1

SSL transport should be pretty much transparent to c3p0. just set up your postgres RDBMS to use SSL. the postgres JDBC driver supports SSL connections. if you are using a self-signed certificate though (rather than a certificate signed by one of the well-known certificate authorities), you'll have to either configure your JVM to recognize your self-signed certificate or the JDBC driver not to validate certificates.

You'll need to configure several postgres-specific JDBC Connection Properties. The easiest way to do this is by just appending the properties as standard URL-style params to your postgres-jdbc URL:

jdbc:postgresql://myhost.mydomain/mydb?ssl=true

Or (dangerously)

jdbc:postgresql://myhost.mydomain/mydb?ssl=true&sslfactory=org.postgresql.ssl.NonValidatingFactory

Those should work if you are configuring user and password (as usual) via c3p0 configuration parameters. Alternatively, you can configure all of the Connection parameters in a Properties object. Here is how that would work for c3p0:

// obviously, imports should go where there should go
import java.util.Properties;
import com.mchange.v2.c3p0.ComboPooledDataSource;

// this is very close to the postgres docs
Properties props = new Properties();
props.setProperty("user", myUsername);
props.setProperties("password", myPassword);
props.setProperty("ssl","true");
props.setProperty("sslfactory","org.postgresql.ssl.NonValidatingFactory");

// this is c3p0-specific
ComboPooledDataSource cpds = new ComboPooledDataSource();
cpds.setJdbcUrl("jdbc:postgresql://myhost.mydomain/mydb");
cpds.setProperties( props );
// set any other properties you wish to override from values in config and/or defaults

The easiest way, I think, will be to just set jdbcUrl, user, and password in c3p0 config files and append ssl params to the end of your postgres jdbc URL.