Configure SSL for HCD

Configure SSL for Hyper-Converged Database (HCD) by implementing Client Certificate Authentication. Following this approach, each node verifies the service or client making a request against a local truststore to validate that the certificate was issued by a known Certificate Authority (CA).

Create SSL certificates, keystores, and truststores

You can implement SSL using CA signed certificates signed by well-known CAs, or by creating your own root CA. DataStax recommends using certificates signed by a CA to reduce SSL certificate management tasks. However, you can use self-signed certificates with HCD, which supports SSL certificates in local and external keystores.

Creating your own CA in a production environments typically involves using an intermediary certificate chain, where the root CA signs one or more intermediate certificates with its private key. These intermediary certificates chain together to link back to the root CA, which owns one or more trusted roots.

Where to configure SSL

HCD supports SSL encryption between nodes (node-to-node communication) and between clients and nodes (client-to-node communication). You can use SSL to encrypt in-flight data for the following HCD services and clients.

HCD services

Use SSL to encrypt data in the following node-to-node connections:

HCD Core

HCD clients

Use SSL to secure connections from a client to the coordinator node to establish client-to-node connections:

HCD drivers
CQL shell (cqlsh)
DataStax Bulk Loader
DataStax Apache Kafka Connector
HCD tools