Stuart Parker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> On Friday, April 26, 2002, at 11:39 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> >
> > I'm not sure what you mean when you say that you paid for a 40bit
> > certificate. Do you mean an SGC cert?
> >
>
> No. We purchased through a local Verisign distributor which sells Global
> (128-bit SSL) and Secure (40-bit SSL) certificates. This was a renewal
> of an expired certificate which is definately 40-bit. Being in Australia
> it was not possible 2 years ago to get a 128 bit certificate for a web
> site, so we had to go for 40-bit certificates. I think in the US at the
> time they referred to the difference as 'domestic' vs 'international'.
> domestic was 128-bit and international was 40-bit.
>
> The reason I am chasing this up is that on a deployed site, we are
> getting data encryption errors being reported to users since putting the
> renewed certificate in place. It happens quite infrequently, and may
> only affect a few browsers, but I needed to determine whether it is
> standard or acceptable behaviour for browsers and servers to upgrade a
> connection in this way and whether there are any gotchas for any
> platforms or browsers. Secondly, if 40 bit certificates can allow
> connections at 128 bit when the browser supports it, why buy a 128 bit
> certificate which is twice as expensive?
As far as I know, there is in fact no such thing as a 40-bit cert.
There are two kinds of certificates:
(1) Ordinary X.509 certs containing an RSA key of whatever strength
you've chosen.
(2) Certs containing the SGC/Step-Up extensions.
There are three kinds of browsers in the world:
(1) Really old export browsers which will only do 40 bit crypto.
(2) Newer export browsers which will do SGC/Step-Up.
(3) Old domestic browsers or new (post export-control removal)
export browsers which do strong crypto.
So, the interaction matrix between certificates and browsers looks like
this:
Cert
Browser Ordinary SGC/Step-Up
----------------------------------------------------------------
Old Export 40-bit crypto 40-bit crypto
Newer Export 40-bit crypto SGC/Step-Up to strong
New Export/Domestic Strong crypto Strong crypto
There is no way to tag an X.509 certificate in such a way that
it is 40-bit only.
-Ekr
--
[Eric Rescorla [EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Author of "SSL and TLS: Designing and Building Secure Systems"
http://www.rtfm.com/
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