I hope everyone has heard by now of the IE SSL Certificate problem: http://online.securityfocus.com/archive/1/286895/2002-08-08/2002-08-14/1 http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/26620.html
Some time ago, the certificates and the directory would be automatically installed and included when I did something like s_client, it would display the cert chain and information and it usually found things and verified it properly. Now it doesn't work. ANYWHERE. Apple's Mac OS X / Darwin, Linux, etc. I can't find any implementation that has the certificates properly installed. Even if all the applications work properly, they will all fail because the root certs won't be there to validate the chain. Curl and lynx-ssl both have cert bugs, probably more severe than IE since they don't seem to do anything to check the certs (I have contacted the authors and supplied patches). I haven't checked wget-ssl, links-ssl, and others, but I suspect they are broken too. I thought Open Source was supposed to be better than Microsoft, especially on issues like security. I just spent a while searching for implementation information about how to CORRECTLY write the cert callback on openssl.org. I even had trouble finding this list. No news. No information. Nothing. A few sparse docs. Some links, some broken. I implemented a "correct" version as an encrypting proxy for Lynx a long time ago, so I knew how to fix things. There seem to be several related problems. First, the certs and hashes aren't installed by default so things won't work even if implemented correctly. Right now the problems with the applications can't be fixed with a useful result since it requires the signing certs to do validation. I have to do "make rehash" then copy the contents of the directory. Second, SSL_CTX_set_default_verify_paths(conn->ssl.ctx) isn't being called. There are no default paths, so many apps couldn't find them anyway. Third, even if the callback returns "not ok", the SSL_connect function returns and the SSL_get_error doesn't say anything about cert errors. The default callback seems to check things, but doesn't report anything and doesn't prevent the connection. As far as I can tell, the only way to pass the information from the callback to the main routine is via a global variable and you have to use that to exit after the call to SSL_connect. I don't know what the historic reasons for doing things a particular way, but I would suggest the following (in order of importance): 1. Install the certs by default, or if there are nontechnical reasons not to, add something prominent to the readmes and make process so that the certs directory will be populated by the users or the distributor creators. 1a. Add the rehash function to the tools/apps that are installed. 1b. Create an "add-on" archive for just the certs directory or certs.pem file so no rebuilds would be necessary. Without 1, even if everything is fixed on the app level, it would just render the application unusable in most cases. This might be the reason most applications don't bother to check security - they can't. 2. Have SSL_connect FAIL UNLESS a non-default verify callback forces ok to be true. Have the default verify callback check the cert chain properly. Here, the idea is that with anything to do with security, the best thing to do is to fail unless explicitly told not to. Either it can be done once here, or every app using it for browsing will need fixing. 3. (this would be optional, but it would break more things if not done) Make the default paths load upon context creation, have the user set these to NULL if that is what is wanted. With these three things, the existing programs would work and be secure by default. I would be open to any better way of fixing all the apps currently using OpenSSL to access secure web sites without being secure. I also may be wrong on some of the above. I basically implemented the dnsspoof version and worked to fix the sources for lynx and curl and found that I needed to do things beyond fixing the source. ______________________________________________________________________ OpenSSL Project http://www.openssl.org Development Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Automated List Manager [EMAIL PROTECTED]
