Question regarding web hosting ip addressing

Fri Jul 12 18:36:18 UTC 2002

On Fri, 12 Jul 2002 07:17:35 -0700 Scott Francis <darkuncle at darkuncle.net> wrote:
> > a different certificate for each site while using one IP address.
> > (Correct me if I'm wrong!)

> According to http://httpd.apache.org/docs/vhosts/name-based.html (thanks
> Gerald), name-based hosting cannot be used with SSL due to the nature of
> the
> SSL protocol.

correct. there's a specific technical problem due to the way that the https
protocol is designed; it's a chicken-and-egg problem.

specifically, name based identification of sites is based on the HTTP host
request-header field. in https, the certificates are processed before the
Host request-header is transmitted; Host is supposed to be inside the
encrypted tunnel.

a different design might have permitted named based https identification of
virtual web site, but they did what they did.

richard
--
Richard Welty                                         rwelty at averillpark.net
Averill Park Networking                                         518-573-7592
              Unix, Linux, IP Network Engineering, Security