TLS-protected syslog: Summary

# Encrypting Syslog Traffic with TLS (SSL)

Written by Rainer Gerhards (2008-07-03)

- Overview
- Sample Scenario
- Setting up the CA
- Generating Machine Certificates
- Setting up the Central Server
- Setting up syslog Clients
- Setting up the UDP syslog relay
- Wrapping it all up

### Summary

If you followed the steps outlined in this documentation set, you now have
a reasonable (for most needs) secure setup for the following environment:

You have learned about the security decisions involved and which we made in this example. Be once again reminded that you must make sure yourself that whatever you do matches your security needs! There is no guarantee that what we generally find useful actually is. It may even be totally unsuitable for your environment.

In the example, we created a rsyslog certificate authority (CA). Guard the CA's files. You need them whenever you need to create a new machine certificate. We also saw how to generate the machine certificates themselfs and distribute them to the individual machines. Also, you have found some configuration samples for a sever, a client and a syslog relay. Hopefully, this will enable you to set up a similar system in many environments.

Please be warned that you defined some expiration dates for the certificates. After they are reached, the certificates are no longer valid and rsyslog will NOT accept them. At that point, syslog messages will no longer be transmitted (and rsyslogd will heavily begin to complain). So it is a good idea to make sure that you renew the certificates before they expire. Recording a reminder somewhere is probably a good idea.

If you have any more questions, please visit the rsyslog forum and simply ask ;)

## Copyright

Copyright (c) 2008 Rainer Gerhards and Adiscon.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license can be viewed at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html.