Node.js - Using https.request() with an internal CA

Question

Who do I get https.request() to trust my internally-signed server certificate. Here is a quick example of the code I'm running in v0.10.25:

var options = {
     hostname: 'encrypted.mydomain.local',
     port: 443,
     path: '/',
     method: 'GET'
};

var https = require('https')
https.request(options)

I'm running this on a Windows system which has my internal root CA trusted at the system level, but whenever I make a request like this I get the exception

events.js:72
        throw er; // Unhandled 'error' event
              ^
Error: CERT_UNTRUSTED
    at SecurePair.<anonymous> (tls.js:1370:32)
    at SecurePair.EventEmitter.emit (events.js:92:17)
    at SecurePair.maybeInitFinished (tls.js:982:10)
    at CleartextStream.read [as _read] (tls.js:469:13)
    at CleartextStream.Readable.read (_stream_readable.js:320:10)
    at EncryptedStream.write [as _write] (tls.js:366:25)
    at doWrite (_stream_writable.js:223:10)
    at writeOrBuffer (_stream_writable.js:213:5)
    at EncryptedStream.Writable.write (_stream_writable.js:180:11)
    at write (_stream_readable.js:583:24)

For a little more detail, this is all happening inside of the node-atlassian-crowd module I'm attempting to use for authentication

Answer 1

You need to add a ca: cafile.pem line to your options. See http://nodejs.org/api/https.html#https_https_request_options_callback for more details.

The relevant portion:

The following options from tls.connect() can also be specified. However, a globalAgent silently ignores these.

pfx: Certificate, Private key and CA certificates to use for SSL. Default null.

key: Private key to use for SSL. Default null.

passphrase: A string of passphrase for the private key or pfx. Default null.

cert: Public x509 certificate to use. Default null.

ca: An authority certificate or array of authority certificates to check the remote host against.

During application startup, read in the CA's certificate file with something like var casigningcert = fs.readFileSync('keys/ca-certsigning-cert.pem') and then consume it later in your options, which should then look something like:

var options = {
  hostname: 'encrypted.mydomain.local',
  port: 443,
  path: '/',
  method: 'GET',
  ca: casigningcert
  };