For a long time I have been using "makecert.exe" to create my own certificate used for WCF communication between two clients.
Now and then I get error reports from users which have a higher security/validation procedures and errors are raised like this:
UntrustedRoot: A certificate chain processed, but terminated in a root certificate which is not trusted by the trust provider
Now, I want to get rid of this and purchase a certificate. Preferably with a very long expiration date. But the questions are;
what type of certificate do I need? (what is the name of the certificate type)
where can I buy this? I would appreciate at least one line so I can verify certificate type as well.
Related
I want my site to be secure using HTTPS protocols. I managed to make a self-signed key to be trustedCertEntry as I made my own CA certificate, with different CN, which I used to sign my own private certificate.
It works smooth testing it with openssl with something like:
openssl s_client -connect www.mydomain.com:80 -tls1 -state
Thus, browser doesn't report a certificate self-signed error, as it sees a different CA.
But I get a SEC_ERROR_UNKNOWN_ISSUER error. Still it seems logical to me as nobody knows me as a CA. It is supposed to work if user adds exception for me.
I thought this trick was acceptable and it was like many https compliant sites were working, as you may visit a unknown site and you want to encrypt communications from 3rd party watchers but trust that page.
After trying to get a clear response for it, beyond coding that I will find resources, my question is:
If I want to have a site, for which the users don't have to add an exception in the first visit, do I have to get a certificate from a "world-known" CA? Or am I missing a solution for self-signing my certificate with my own CA certificate?
Technically speaking, the answer is: Yes, you will have to get a certificate from a CA that is trusted by your users' browsers via a chain of intermediary CA's that ends at an inherently trusted root CA. The accepted answer to this question explains how it works: SSL Certificate framework 101: How does the browser actually verify the validity of a given server certificate?
Having said that, if your "only" concern is to provide encrypted connections, you might be able to leverage the Let's Encrypt CA, which provides free certificates for that purpose. Those certificates will be only domain-validated, which provides a weaker kind of assurance of identity than, for example, an Extended Validation Certificate.
Depending on the browser used, there will be minimal difference in user experience between DV and EV certificates. For Safari, the user will see a grey padlock in the address bar for the lower assurance DV-backed sites, like this:
and a green padlock when higher identity assurance is provided, like this:
Whether the former is good enough for you (or your customers) depends on your situation.
In case you want to understand what "inherently trusted" actually means for web browsers, see this blog post: Who your browser trusts, and how to control it.
I'm writing a utility Mac OS X app that basically acts as a web server accepting incoming HTTP requests (think of it as a mock REST API server). I want to be able to support HTTPS, but ideally I'd like to remove the requirement for my users to have to purchase their own SSL certificates.
I've been thinking a little on how I might achieve this. Let's say I register a domain called myapp.com. I then purchase an SSL cert for myserver.myapp.com that is signed by a registered CA. I ship my app with those SSL cert details embedded within it. All my users have to do is update their /etc/hosts file to point myserver.myapp.com to whatever IP address my app is installed and running on.
In fact, by far, the most common scenario would be my app running on the same machine as the client, so I'm considering updating the main DNS entry for myserver.myapp.com to point to 127.0.0.1, and most users wouldn't have to change anything.
So, that's the basic theory. What have I missed that would make this an unworkable plan? A couple of things that have crossed my mind:
I could use a self-signed cert. However, many SSL clients barf (or throw up warnings) if the cert doesn't have a valid CA chain. I'm happy to pay the money for a real cert to alleviate this inconvenience for my users.
I would be embedding the private key for my SSL cert into my app. In theory, someone could extract that and use it to impersonate my app. I guess my reaction is "so what?" My app is a small productivity app, it isn't an e-commerce site. It doesn't collect sensitive info. It literally just simulates web server responses so devs can test their apps.
Any advice/feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
This won't work - but for nontechnical reasons.
Distributing an SSL certificate to your users along with its associated key will violate the issuance terms of your SSL certificate provider, and they will revoke the certificate when they discover what you have done. (This happened, for example, when Pivotal tried to offer SSL service for developers through sslip.io.) This will, of course, cause your application to stop working.
If your users have administrative access to their machines, they can create and trust their own self-signed CA using Keychain Access. Once they have done so, they could create a certificate (again, using Keychain Access) and insert that into your application to enable SSL.
As said in the other answer you can't ship the same certificate for everybody. What you could do is generate different for everybody:
The application ask them the domain name they want to use (a domain they must own, like myapp.example.com)
The application use the ACME protocol to get automatically a trusted certificate from let's encrypt
Note: you can provide them subdomains of a domain you control (like [clientid].yourappname.yourdomain.com) ONLY of you can register yourappname.yourdomain.com in the public suffix list (because let's encrypt have rate limits)
One of our queue managers certificate is about to expire, it is been advised that renewing it is much cheaper than replacing the old one. These are the below steps which we are following(Through IBM Key Management):
Choose the personal certificate and select re-create - Renewal.csr
Send the Renewal.csr to CA for COMODO certificate - RenewedComodo
Choose the personal certificate and select Receive to import RenewedComodo. ( Refresh Security )
When creating a new certificate we opt for Personal Certificate Request and select new.This is the first step. and we follow the 2 and 3 steps.
Here is my query, other than selecting the re-create, there is no difference I had set up.
When I have two certificates as RenewalCOMODO and oldCOMODO, how do queue manager knows which is righteous.?
If it selects which is not expired, won't it be having the expired one in the database?
If we need to delete the old one, after adding the renewed one, How will it be different from replacing the certificates?
This will require a little background before getting to the answers.
When you initially created the CSR what you actually got was a public/private key pair and a Certificate Signing Request or "CSR". The CSR contains the public key and the requested attributes such as Distinguished Name. The CSR is signed with your private key so that any recipient can use the embedded public key to validate that the CSR and the requested attributes have not been tampered with.
What is less well known is that the CA is not bound to apply all the attributes that were provided in the CSR. For example, if the certificate purchased is a Domain Validated certificate and the CSR contains values for the OU field, the CA will simply delete them leaving only the DN and SAN fields plus their own information. Thus the certificate you get back may have different fields than the original CSR.
When you recreate the CSR from an in-use certificate the same process occurs again except that new CSR reflects any changes that the CA made originally. Close inspection of the original CSR and the newly generated one commonly show differences in the SAN or that an email contact has been added to the DN. However, from the CA's point of view these differences are cosmetic.
With that in mind, let's look at the questions again.
When I have two certificates as RenewalCOMODO and oldCOMODO, how do queue manager know which is right?
Assuming that you are talking about the artifacts the CA has provided after responding to the original and renewal CSR, the QMgr does not know which is which. You can run the receive command on either and, assuming both of them were signed by the same CA and use the same signer chain, either will work.
It is the administrator's responsibility to verify that the correct certificate is installed.
If it selects which is not expired, won't it be having the expired one in the database?
No. Each successful receive command keeps the private portions of the personal certificate and replaces the public portions. The label is associated with the private portion and this is checked for uniqueness so you cannot (or at least should not if there are no bugs) be able to have two copies in the same KDB.
If we need to delete the old one, after adding the renewed one, How will it be different from replacing the certificates?
Just make sure you receive the correct certificate. Always do a runmqakm -cert -details command or inspect the cert using the GUI.
Additional recommendations:
Always make a copy of the KDB before working on it.
Keep copies of your CSRs and certs in the KDB directory.
I like to use timestamps in the file names so it is obvious what the history was. My file names all start with YYYYMMDD like 20150908_QMName_CSR.arm and 20150908_QMName_CSR_signed.arm.
Make sure that the file permissions of the certificate files, KDB, and directory holding them are set to deny any access by anyone other than the MQM service account. If that's not possible, allow group access but make sure the members of the mqm group are as few as possible. Anyone who can read the certificates can use them. It is not necessary to know the password to the KDB to use the certs it contains.
When performing maintenance, I like to make a new copy of the KDB (with timestamped file name as described earlier) and when I'm sure it is ready I change the QMgr's SSLKEYR attribute to point to it. I then change the old file to be read-only and issue RESET SECURITY TYPE(SSL) on the QMgr.
Always remember to issue RESET SECURITY TYPE(SSL) on the QMgr. It is a rather disruptive command so try to not issue it when the QMgr is busy. It will require all channels to shut down and lots of reconnect attempts will prevent it from completing quickly.
I am interested in web security right now. So I read about PKI and Diffie Hellman authentication forms.
Now I am reading about certificates and I ask me how that works. So I know Browser have some trusted certificates in it, so you trust the pages, the company which the browser is from, trusts already. So when A trusts B and B trusts C --> A trusts C. Standart Web-of-trust thing.
But what I don't get is how for example google did it when they made there applications https. I never had to download a certificate. How works that?
There are a number of commercial bodies whose business is the issuance of digital certificates; these are called "Certificate Authorities" or CAs. The certificates of the top-level keys of these bodies are distributed with the common web browsers, so you will already have them installed.
If you (or Google, or anyone else) want a certificate for your key you send a request (and some money) to one of the well-known CAs. The CA performs some checks to verify that you are who you say you are, and (as long as the checks check out) they make a new certificare by signing your key with their certificate-signing key.
When you send your certificate to some third party they can check your certificate using the CA's certificate stored in their browser, and this allows them to establish that the identity you claim in your certificate is correct.
There are various levels of certificate which carry different levels of guarantee that the identity claimed in the certificate is correct. Basically, the more you pay the more trouble the CA takes in checking your identity and the more insurance they buy!
All browsers store certificates of Certification Authority, who in turn issue certificates for various organizations.
What is the series of steps needed to securely verify a ssl certificate? My (very limited) understanding is that when you visit an https site, the server sends a certificate to the client (the browser) and the browser gets the certificate's issuer information from that certificate, then uses that to contact the issuerer, and somehow compares certificates for validity.
How exactly is this done?
What about the process makes it immune to man-in-the-middle attacks?
What prevents some random person from setting up their own verification service to use in man-in-the-middle attacks, so everything "looks" secure?
Here is a very simplified explanation:
Your web browser downloads the web server's certificate, which contains the public key of the web server. This certificate is signed with the private key of a trusted certificate authority.
Your web browser comes installed with the public keys of all of the major certificate authorities. It uses this public key to verify that the web server's certificate was indeed signed by the trusted certificate authority.
The certificate contains the domain name and/or ip address of the web server. Your web browser confirms with the certificate authority that the address listed in the certificate is the one to which it has an open connection.
Your web browser generates a shared symmetric key which will be used to encrypt the HTTP traffic on this connection; this is much more efficient than using public/private key encryption for everything. Your browser encrypts the symmetric key with the public key of the web server then sends it back, thus ensuring that only the web server can decrypt it, since only the web server has its private key.
Note that the certificate authority (CA) is essential to preventing man-in-the-middle attacks. However, even an unsigned certificate will prevent someone from passively listening in on your encrypted traffic, since they have no way to gain access to your shared symmetric key.
You said that
the browser gets the certificate's issuer information from that
certificate, then uses that to contact the issuerer, and somehow
compares certificates for validity.
The client doesn't have to check with the issuer because two things :
all browsers have a pre-installed list of all major CAs public keys
the certificate is signed, and that signature itself is enough proof that the certificate is valid because the client can make sure, on his own, and without contacting the issuer's server, that that certificate is authentic. That's the beauty of asymmetric encryption.
Notice that 2. can't be done without 1.
This is better explained in this big diagram I made some time ago
(skip to "what's a signature ?" at the bottom)
It's worth noting that in addition to purchasing a certificate (as mentioned above), you can also create your own for free; this is referred to as a "self-signed certificate". The difference between a self-signed certificate and one that's purchased is simple: the purchased one has been signed by a Certificate Authority that your browser already knows about. In other words, your browser can easily validate the authenticity of a purchased certificate.
Unfortunately this has led to a common misconception that self-signed certificates are inherently less secure than those sold by commercial CA's like GoDaddy and Verisign, and that you have to live with browser warnings/exceptions if you use them; this is incorrect.
If you securely distribute a self-signed certificate (or CA cert, as bobince suggested) and install it in the browsers that will use your site, it's just as secure as one that's purchased and is not vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks and cert forgery. Obviously this means that it's only feasible if only a few people need secure access to your site (e.g., internal apps, personal blogs, etc.).
I KNOW THE BELOW IS LONG, BUT IT IS DETAILED, YET SIMPLIFIED ENOUGH. READ CAREFULLY AND I GUARANTEE YOU'LL START FINDING THIS TOPIC IS NOT ALL THAT COMPLICATED.
First of all, anyone can create 2 keys. One to encrypt data, and another to decrypt data. The former can be a private key, and the latter a public key, AND VICERZA.
Second of all, in simplest terms, a Certificate Authority (CA) offers the service of creating a certificate for you. How? They use certain values (the CA's issuer name, your server's public key, company name, domain, etc.) and they use their SUPER DUPER ULTRA SECURE SECRET private key and encrypt this data. The result of this encrypted data is a SIGNATURE.
So now the CA gives you back a certificate. The certificate is basically a file containing the values previously mentioned (CA's issuer name, company name, domain, your server's public key, etc.), INCLUDING the signature (i.e. an encrypted version of the latter values).
Now, with all that being said, here is a REALLY IMPORTANT part to remember: your device/OS (Windows, Android, etc.) pretty much keeps a list of all major/trusted CA's and their PUBLIC KEYS (if you're thinking that these public keys are used to decrypt the signatures inside the certificates, YOU ARE CORRECT!).
Ok, if you read the above, this sequential example will be a breeze now:
Example-Company asks Example-CA to create for them a certificate.
Example-CA uses their super private key to sign this certificate and gives Example-Company the certificate.
Tomorrow, internet-user-Bob uses Chrome/Firefox/etc. to browse to https://example-company.com. Most, if not all, browsers nowadays will expect a certificate back from the server.
The browser gets the certificate from example-company.com. The certificate says it's been issued by Example-CA. It just so happens to be that Bob's OS already has Example-CA in its list of trusted CA's, so the browser gets Example-CA's public key. Remember: this is all happening in Bob's computer/mobile/etc., not over the wire.
So now the browser decrypts the signature in the certificate. FINALLY, the browser compares the decrypted values with the contents of the certificate itself. IF THE CONTENTS MATCH, THAT MEANS THE SIGNATURE IS VALID!
Why? Think about it, only this public key can decrypt the signature in such a way that the contents look like they did before the private key encrypted them.
How about man in the middle attacks?
This is one of the main reasons (if not the main reason) why the above standard was created.
Let's say hacker-Jane intercepts internet-user-Bob's request, and replies with her own certificate. However, hacker-Jane is still careful enough to state in the certificate that the issuer was Example-CA. Lastly, hacker-Jane remembers that she has to include a signature on the certificate. But what key does Jane use to sign (i.e. create an encrypted value of the certificate main contents) the certificate?????
So even if hacker-Jane signed the certificate with her own key, you see what's gonna happen next. The browser is gonna say: "ok, this certificate is issued by Example-CA, let's decrypt the signature with Example-CA's public key". After decryption, the browser notices that the certificate contents don't match at all. Hence, the browser gives a very clear warning to the user, and it says it doesn't trust the connection.
The client has a pre-seeded store of SSL certificate authorities' public keys. There must be a chain of trust from the certificate for the server up through intermediate authorities up to one of the so-called "root" certificates in order for the server to be trusted.
You can examine and/or alter the list of trusted authorities. Often you do this to add a certificate for a local authority that you know you trust - like the company you work for or the school you attend or what not.
The pre-seeded list can vary depending on which client you use. The big SSL certificate vendors insure that their root certs are in all the major browsers ($$$).
Monkey-in-the-middle attacks are "impossible" unless the attacker has the private key of a trusted root certificate. Since the corresponding certificates are widely deployed, the exposure of such a private key would have serious implications for the security of eCommerce generally. Because of that, those private keys are very, very closely guarded.
if you're more technically minded, this site is probably what you want: http://www.zytrax.com/tech/survival/ssl.html
warning: the rabbit hole goes deep :).