I recently read something that mentioned SSL termination...in it the author mentioned that the WFE's in 2013 shouldn't be offloaded when a loadbalancer is in place as was done in the past with prior versions.
Instead the author mentioned that SSL should be terminated at the WFE's....
I was planning on offloading SSL at the load balancer for my office web app farm which i still plan to do, but now am curious as to if i should do this for my WFE's as well.
Pro's / Con's ?
SSL offloading will still meet the "use SSL for SPS 2013" train of thought.
Whether SSL offloading is a risk in your environment is dependent on a number of things that only you can make the call on.
The traffic between the client and the load balancer will be secure and the traffic between the load balancer and the web front ends will not be.
Client PC --[Secure HTTPS]--> Load Balancer --[HTTP]--> Web Front End Server
If someone understands your environment they could exploit the traffic between the load balancer and the web front end. This "man in the middle" attack is less likely than someone poking around with the traffic between your desktops and the load balancer.
If you want SSL all the way from client to server then that's OK too but consider setting up the load balancer to keep session affinity so that the SSL channel doesn't need to get renegotiated all the time.
Hope this helps!
