Including Jordan Brown who is the person that has been replying previously.
This is a merger of both previous responses from Aaron and Howard.
Doug.
Post by Aaron Richton[...]
Post by Doug Leavitt#ifdef X509_V_FLAG_PARTIAL_CHAIN
Perhaps with a doc patch too, since this would make OpenLDAP one of
(apparently very) few OpenSSL-linked applications that honors partial
chains.
I think perhaps the most informative way to look at it is by way of
comparison to browser behavior.
If you have a web site with a certificate like:
rootCA -> servercert
and your browser's trust list doesn't include rootCA, your browser will
prompt you for a security exception. When you approve the security
exception, it will add servercert to its trust list... not rootCA.
After that, it will accept connections using servercert, but will not in
general accept certificates signed by rootCA.
We want that same semantic in LDAP processing.
(Now, to be complete there would also be ways to accept cases like
certificates that have the wrong server name in them. Browsers handle
that; I'm not proposing a way for LDAP to handle those cases.)
Post by Aaron RichtonPost by Doug LeavittOpenSSL by default ignores trust-list entries that are not for root
CAs. Adding just the "mysystem" certificate has no effect. With this
change, you can add the "mysystem" certificate and that will cause
OpenSSL to accept this certificate, even though the trust list does
not include the CA's root certificate.
The comment "even though the trust list does not include the CA's root
An argument that we take today's behavior (require rootCA;
mysystemA[rootCA] or mysystemB[rootCA] are both OK) and make it more
strict with "require rootCA AND mysystemA[rootCA]" intuitively sounds
like an increase in security...if you have a client environment
controlled enough to distribute ldap.example.com's material along with
your CA store, go for it.
But the concept of "require ldap.example.com" while (optionally?)
throwing out the existing rootCA (and presumably its associated
CRL/OCSP/etc.) checking sounds like it could introduce risk. So is
ldap.example.com truly an "add" to the chain, or is the rootCA not
included (i.e. removed)?
This change is interesting in cases where rootCA is not included in the
trust list. (It may have been removed, or may have never been included;
that depends on what your original trust list looked like.)
Let's take a few examples.
Consider two certificates: a certificate issued to myserver by rootCA,
and a certificate issued to a villain by rootCA.
Trust list: rootCA
Today: accept all certificates rootCA->*, including both
rootCA->myserver and rootCA->villain
With this change: Same
Trust list: rootCA, rootCA->myserver
Today: Accept all certificates rootCA->*. (myserver entry has no effect)
With this change: Same
Trust list: rootCA->myserver (no rootCA certificate)
Today: Accept nothing.
With this change: Accept rootCA->myserver (but not rootCA->villain)
First, note that the behavior changes only when the rootCA->myserver
certificate is included in the trust list. Today, that entry is
completely meaningless in an OpenLDAP trust list.
Second, note that today, if you want to be able to connect to myserver,
you *must* accept all rootCA-signed certificates. You cannot choose to
accept rootCA->myserver while rejecting rootCA->villain. With this
change, you can choose to accept myserver while rejecting villain.
Similar discussions apply to intermediate CAs and are left as an
exercise for the reader.
Post by Aaron RichtonPretty sure adding this feature will break compatibility with default
OpenSSL installs. We already went thru this headache for GnuTLS.
http://www.openldap.org/its/index.cgi/Software%20Bugs?id=5991
This bug talks about what certificates one presents to the peer. That's
not at all the question. The question is what certificates one (in
particular the client, but could apply to the server too) *accepts*.
Post by Aaron RichtonNormal practice for servers is to trust only a single CA chain - the
one that issued its own cert and all the client certs that it intends
to honor.
I'm talking about what certificates a client accepts, not what
certificates a server accepts, but the same principles apply.
Suppose that Verisign issued your server's certificate, and will issue
all of your clients' certificates. OK, but... you are also forced to
accept certificates that Verisign issued to *me*. Did you really want
to accept those?
Post by Aaron RichtonNormal practice for clients is to trust multiple CA chains, assuming
the client is used with multiple servers owned by disparate admin
authorities. (Or, if only used in one administrative context, just a
single chain.)
So far it looks to me like you want to support broken server
configurations.
No... we want to trust only particular subtrees, not necessarily all
certificates signed by the root.
Post by Aaron RichtonI recognize the desire to only trust the immediate superior CA of an
end entity's own cert; that sort of makes sense. But certs can only be
trusted if you also trust their issuer, you cannot make valid
assertions about a cert if you don't follow the chain all the way back
to a self-signer (which you also explicitly trust).
Not at all true.
Once Verisign has issued a CA certificate to (say) Oracle, only Oracle
can issue new certificates against that CA certificate. Even Verisign
cannot issue certificates against that CA certificate, because Verisign
does not have the private key for that certificate. Verisign could
issue a new (bogus) certificate that says "Oracle", but it would not be
the same certificate; if you are trusting that original certificate then
certificates based on the new bogus certificate would not be trusted.
Post by Aaron RichtonAlso if you only want to trust the 1-level superior of a particular
cert, you probably should not have been using commercial/3rd-party CAs
in the first place. Clearly in the scenarios you've outlined, the fact
that someone paid for a cert from a well-known commercial root CA is
irrelevant here. They would have been better off creating their own CA
cert and using it to create their end entity certs.
That assumes that the server administrators and all of the client share
the same level of paranoia.
Less paranoid clients might trust the 3rd party root CA, while more
paranoid clients might trust only the organization's CA (rootCA->orgCA),
and still more paranoid clients might trust only the particular server
(rootCA->orgCA->myserver). A client should be in charge of its own
level of paranoia - it would be wrong for a paranoid client to force the
server to force all of the other clients to be paranoid, just as it
would be wrong for a less-paranoid client to force the server to force
all of the other clients to be less paranoid.