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Secure Access to Google App Engine

September 17, 2009 · 4 Comments

Google App Engine supports HTTPS if you access your application through https://abc.appspot.com but not through https://www.abc.com. Google is working on a solution but there is currently no ETA. From a technology point of view, it comes down to the question of where your SSL is terminated. To have https, the certificate must reside on the server that fields the call. If it does not, your browser gives you a certificate error. Google has a generic *.appspot.com certificate at every app engine server but they don’t want to put a yourdomain.com certificate on servers in their infrastructure.

For some companies HTTPS access through their own domain is essential.

We at Early Stage IT use an interim solution — a proxy server. The pricing and reliability parameters are not fully set but we think it might cost about $35/month plus $0.30/GB for 3-nines availability. It would also add about 125 msec to each access request. We measured the delay at 75 msec but it may have been on a particularly calm day, internet-traffic-wise. Proxy servers terminate the SSL connection at the proxy with a yourdomain.com certificate, decrypt the message, re-encrypt it with a *.appspot.com certificate and send it along. The message can theoretically be snooped on while it is being transformed on that proxy server.

With these parameters, is this a service that would be of interest to your company?

Categories: Requirements
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