How do I connect the GUI wallet to a TLS remote node?

Question

I have a Monero node running in a cloud container, configured as a public node:

monerod --rpc-bind-ip 0.0.0.0 --confirm-external-bind --restricted-rpc --non-interactive

I have a reverse proxy sitting in front of it that does SSL termination such that you can access the RPC at https://example.com:443/json_rpc and get a successful response

curl -X POST https://example.com:443/json_rpc  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' - '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":"0","method":"get_version"}'

returns

{
  "id": "0",
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "result": {
    "status": "OK",
    "untrusted": false,
    "version": 131073
  }
}

However, when I enter my node details (example.com and 443) into the remote node and port in the GUI it doesn't successfully connect. I'm not sure where I can see more details on the error.

Searching online suggests that using a reverse proxy is the proper way to secure the JSON-RPC from prying eyes, but I can't find any information on how to connect the GUI to such a node.

Answer 1

Neither the CLI or GUI have support for SSL RPC connections. Therefore you have to proxy both server and client over SSL. You can setup a client stunnel proxy to point to the node that is fronted by an SSL proxy and then in the GUI, specify the remote node as localhost and your stunnel client port.