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SSL/TLS is supported by Redis starting with version 6 as an optional feature that needs to be enabled at compile time.

To build with TLS support you'll need OpenSSL development libraries (e.g. libssl-dev on Debian/Ubuntu).

Run make BUILD_TLS=yes.

To run Redis test suite with TLS, you'll need TLS support for TCL (i.e. tcl-tls package on Debian/Ubuntu).

Run ./utils/gen-test-certs.sh to generate a root CA and a server certificate.

Run ./runtest --tls or ./runtest-cluster --tls to run Redis and Redis Cluster tests in TLS mode.

To manually run a Redis server with TLS mode (assuming gen-test-certs.sh was invoked so sample certificates/keys are available):

To connect to this Redis server with redis-cli:

In order to support TLS, Redis must be configured with a X.509 certificate and a private key. In addition, it is necessary to specify a CA certificate bundle file or path to be used as a trusted root when validating certificates. To support DH based ciphers, a DH params file can also be configured. For example:

The tls-port configuration directive enables accepting SSL/TLS connections on the specified port. This is in addition to listening on port for TCP connections, so it is possible to access Redis on different ports using TLS and non-TLS connections simultaneously.

You may specify port 0 to disable the non-TLS port completely. To enable only TLS on the default Redis port, use:

By default, Redis uses mutual TLS and requires clients to authenticate with a valid certificate (authenticated against trusted root CAs specified by ca-cert-file or ca-cert-dir).

You may use tls-auth-clients no to disable client authentication.

A Redis master server handles connecting clients and replica servers in the same way, so the above tls-port and tls-auth-clients directives apply to replication links as well.

On the replica server side, it is necessary to specify tls-replication yes to use TLS for outgoing connections to the master.

When Redis Cluster is used, use tls-cluster yes in order to enable TLS for the cluster bus and cross-node connections.

Sentinel inherits its networking configuration from the common Redis configuration, so all of the above applies to Sentinel as well.

When connecting to master servers, Sentinel will use the tls-replication directive to determine if a TLS or non-TLS connection is required.

Additional TLS configuration is available to control the choice of TLS protocol versions, ciphers and cipher suites, etc. Please consult the self documented redis.conf for more information.

TLS adds a layer to the communication stack with overheads due to writing/reading to/from an SSL connection, encryption/decryption and integrity checks. Consequently, using TLS results in a decrease of the achievable throughput per Redis instance (for more information refer to this discussion).

I/O threading is currently not supported with TLS.

Read more:
TLS Support Redis