CRE-2025-0121
NGINX Ingress Controller SSL Certificate FailureCriticalImpact: 10/10Mitigation: 7/10
Description
Critical NGINX Ingress Controller SSL certificate validation failure detected. This pattern indicates\ncascading SSL failures where certificate verification errors lead to upstream connection failures\nand service unavailability. The failure sequence shows SSL handshake failures, certificate verification\nerrors, and resulting HTTP error responses that affect client connectivity.\n
Mitigation
IMMEDIATE ACTIONS:\n- Check SSL certificate expiration: `openssl x509 -in cert.pem -text -noout | grep -A2 Validity`\n- Verify certificate chain: `openssl verify -CAfile ca-bundle.pem server.crt`\n- Test SSL connectivity: `openssl s_client -connect hostname:443 -servername hostname`\n- Check NGINX SSL configuration: `nginx -t && nginx -s reload`\n- Monitor SSL handshake errors in real-time: `tail -f /var/log/nginx/error.log | grep SSL`\n\nRECOVERY STEPS:\n1. Replace expired/invalid certificates with valid ones\n2. Update certificate chain with proper intermediate certificates\n3. Verify CA bundle contains trusted root certificates\n4. Restart NGINX Ingress Controller: `kubectl rollout restart deployment/nginx-ingress-controller`\n5. Test SSL endpoints: `curl -v https://your-domain.com/health`\n6. Monitor certificate auto-renewal processes\n\nPREVENTION:\n- Implement automated certificate monitoring and alerting\n- Set up certificate auto-renewal with cert-manager or similar tools\n- Configure certificate expiration alerts (30, 7, 1 days before expiry)\n- Implement SSL health checks in monitoring systems\n- Use certificate transparency monitoring for unauthorized certificates\n- Regular SSL configuration audits and security scans\n- Implement proper certificate lifecycle management\n- Set up backup certificate authorities and failover mechanisms\n