Secure Gateways

Connect your external environments — such as an appliance deployment — to your Reemo infrastructure through a dedicated, isolated entry point secured with mutual TLS (mTLS), without exposing your Reemo infrastructure’s internal PKI.

See also

Provision the Appliance — Deploying an on-premises appliance to connect to your Reemo infrastructure.

Access: verified_user Admin Area > shield Network & Security > vpn_lock Secure Gateways.

How It Works

A Secure Gateway acts as a reverse proxy, typically powered by NGINX, that controls and encrypts all inbound and outbound traffic between your infrastructure and an external environment.

Each gateway keeps two trust domains separate:

  • Internal PKI: the PKI already used by your Reemo infrastructure to authenticate and secure its own internal communications.

  • External PKI: secures the connection with the external environment — either a certificate authority you provide, or one generated automatically by the system.

When you create a Secure Gateway, the system automatically issues a server certificate for the NGINX proxy that handles both:

  • internal connections, using your internal PKI;

  • external connections, using the external certificate.

Create a Secure Gateway

  1. Open verified_user Admin Area > shield Network & Security > vpn_lock Secure Gateways, then click + New Secure Gateway.

  2. Fill in the form fields.

  3. Click Create.

Note

Creating a Secure Gateway here is a declarative action: it registers the gateway so your instance can reference and use it, but it does not deploy the gateway itself. The underlying infrastructure is deployed separately, typically via Ansible.

Form Fields

  • Identifier: unique name the system uses to know which Secure Gateway to use when deploying containers with Secure Signal, or which the NGINX proxy uses to fetch the server certificate.

  • Type: resource this gateway serves. The available choices depend on which modules are enabled on your instance — by default, only Signal is available.

  • PKI: whether Reemo generates the external certificate authority automatically, or whether you provide your own.

    • Auto generate PKI: Reemo generates the certificate authority for you. Set the Validity (in days) of the PKI (default: 3650 days).

    • Specify your own PKI: provide your own certificate authority by pasting its KEY (private key, PEM format — PKCS#1 or PKCS#8) and CERT (certificate authority, PEM format).

  • Validity (in days) of generated certificates: lifetime of the server certificates this gateway issues for the NGINX proxy (default: 3650 days). Not shown for every Type — for example, Vault has no such field; it instead has a required Token and container certificate lifetime field under Configuration, in minutes (default: 5).

  • Configuration: additional fields that vary depending on the selected Type — typically a portal URL, IP addresses, and/or port.

See also

Manage Certificates — Expected PEM formats for the KEY/CERT fields.