Proxy https connection with client certificate credentials

Question

Hello, we are building a application like netvibes/iGoogle which allows users to have portlets with rss feeds in them. The portlets are all loaded using ajax and therefore, the RSS feeds must exist on the same domain as the portal. If they don't, you run into problems with cross-domain security issues with ajax. Usually to get around this you just proxy the connection on the server which is very simple with rss feeds that are exposed via http. We however have many feeds that are exposed via https. These feeds likely require a client certificate to authenticate them. Therefore, just doing a basic proxy (take the distant url and open a new connection on the server) won't work because it will build the new connection with the servers credentials and not the users.
Is there a way to build the connection on the server using the users credentials?? How can we proxy this connection over https?
If anyone has ideas, please let me know.
Thanks!

Answer 1

in fact you are more using a reverse-proxy than a proxy since it is on the server part..
You have to put all the SSL server part on the reserve-proxy itself and not on the final RSS feed. Then, the reverse-proxy will authenticate your client and gets its certificate. After that, either this proxy will open a plain connection (no ssl) towards the RSS, or you can also open a ssl connection but this means you must create a client certificate for the proxy. It just depends on the security level you need, and I used this solution many times in professional hosting.
hope it helps !