Based on this post, it's very unclear if a certificate is needed or not. The most important quote I got out of that post is this:
"I reached out to MS BizTalk support and they asked me not to use the
certificate and just use FTP over SSL without certificate. We also
changed the ftp firewall mode to passive and allocate storage to no."
Also consulted this post.
If FileZilla client can connect and send a file to a customer/vendor without a local certificate, then why would BizTalk need one in an FTP SendPort?
And secondly, if it is not needed, in what circumstances would you use it on an FTP SendPort.
It's my understanding that the certificate is some certificate related to the BizTalk host account's personal store on the BizTalk machine, and not the thumbprint of the customer/vendor we are communicating with.
For BT2013 this is MSDN's mysterious definition:
Specify the SHA1 hash of the client certificate that must be used in
the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) negotiation.
Based on this hash, the client certificate is picked up from the
personal store of the user account under which the BizTalk host
instance is running.
This statement gives no guidance as to when it is needed or desired.
This is the other good blog on the subject, but also implied cert is needed, in contradiction to Microsoft support in early link.
You need to use the client certificate, when the FTPS server requires authentication with the client certificate. And you do not use it, when the server does not require that (what is a way more common).
FileZilla does not support the client certificates at all. If you are able to connect with FileZilla, your FTPS server does not require authentication with the client certificate. So you just leave the respective field in BizTalk blank.
Related
Short story
I'm trying to send a POST request from a PL/SQL script using the utl_http utility in Oracle. I've been able to send the request using http, but not https. I've added what I thought was the necessary certificates to a Oracle Wallet, and I believe they are being imported and used (but in all honesty, this is a little hard to verify). My current assumption is that calls from our DB server are passing through a proxy server, and that that is somehow messing up some part of the https / certificate functionality.
Supporting evidence (possibly?): I tried to make calls (POST requests) to a dummy service at webhook.site. Again, I got this working with http, but not https - the latter results in a cert validation error.
I then tried to replicate the behavior using postman, and that basically produces the same result, unless I fiddle around with the settings:
Initial Postman result:
Could not get any response
There was an error connecting to https://webhook.site/950...
Disabling SSL verification
Under the Post man settings, I turned off SSL Certificate Verification, and tried again. This time, I got a 200 OK response, and confirmed that the webhook received the post request fine.
It seems clear that the error is due to a missing cert, but I can't figure out which, or how to configure it. My assumption is that if I can get this to work for a webhook-url from Postman (without disabling cert verification), then I should also be able to get it to work from PL/SQL later.
When I look at the webhook site in a browser and inspect the certs, the webhook cert is the lowest cert (leaf node?). Above it there is one intermediate cert related to the company I'm working for, and then a root cert also related to the company. The root node is named something like "Company Proxy Server CA" - So I'm assuming the proxy somehow manipulates my requests and inserts it's own cert here.
I've tried downloading all of these certs and importing them into my cert store, as well as importing them under the Postman settings (under Certificates) in various combinations, but nothing seems to make any difference; all attempts at posting with HTTPS produces the following error in my Postman Console:
POST https://webhook.site/9505...
Error: unable to verify the first certificate
Any ideas about how to resolve this, or at least obtain more information about what to do would be greatly appreciated.
Switching OFF "SSL Certificate Verification" in Postman only means that it (i.e. Postman) will not check the validity of SSL certificates while making a request. Meaning that it will just send the certificates as they are. Because your connection fails if the setting in ON, this means Postman cannot verify the validity of your certificates.
This is most likely the case with the actual service you're trying to POST to, they cannot verify the certificates. Is that service outside your company network? And is it a public one or one owned by your company? Where is that service hosted? What certificate do they need?
BTW, TLS client certificates are sent as part of establishing the SSL connection, not as part of the HTTP request. The TLS handshake (and exchange/validation of client and server certificates) happens before any HTTP message is sent.
I'm thinking this might be a blocked port issue.
You said... ""Company Proxy Server CA" - So I'm assuming the proxy somehow manipulates my requests and inserts it's own cert here."
That means your client software needs your Company Proxy Server CA in its trusted certificates list. If that client's list is that of the oracle wallet...
https://knowledge.digicert.com/solution/SO979.html
This talks about how to do that.
Also, if your system running postman has a non-oracle based wallet trusted certificate (probably the operating system?) you'll have to execute something like adding the trust to your account on the workstation
https://www.thewindowsclub.com/manage-trusted-root-certificates-windows
in order to have the proxy server certificate trusted.
Once the certificate you're making the connection with has a root of trust per the effective configuration of the client being used, then you'll be able to verify the certificate.
A couple of possible issues:
The server doesn't actually support HTTPS. Connect a browser to the URL that you POST to, and see if you receive a response. (It looks like you already did this, but I'm documenting it for completeness.)
The server uses the Server Name Indication (SNI) extension to determine what certificate chain to send back, but your POSTing client doesn't send that extension. You can identify this case by looking up the IP for the host you're POSTing to, then going to https://nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn/ (obviously use the IP here, instead of the literal string 'nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn') in your browser, and checking the certificate chain it returns. If it is not the same as you get from step 1, this is your problem, and you need to figure out how to either get SNI support in your Oracle PL/SQL client or get the POST endpoint exposed on that hostname. (alternatively, you might be able to use these certificates to prime your Oracle Wallet, but they might have an issue with the hostname in the certificate not matching the hostname you connect to.)
You have a proxy in the way. I don't think this is what's going on, since that would basically only cause problems if you were doing client-side certificate authentication. (If this is the problem or is a condition, you need to import those certificates into your trusted wallet; you also need to ensure that the server you're posting from is going through the same proxy. Otherwise, you need to ensure that the certificate authority for the proxy that the machine actually running the code sees is in the wallet. This may require the assistance of the system/network administrators who run that machine and its connection to the network.)
HTTPS is a finicky beast. Many, many things must work exactly correctly for TLS connections to work and the certificates to correctly verify (the TLS port must respond, the client and server must agree to speak the same version of TLS, the client and server must agree to use the same cipher combination, the certificate chain presented by the server must be issued by a CA the client recognizes, and the leaf certificate in that chain must certify the name client requested).
SNI is needed to support multiple names on a single host without messing with the certifications of other names on the same host. Unfortunately, SNI is one of those things that has been standardized for over a decade (RFC 3546), but many enterprise-grade softwares haven't implemented.
for my new task I have to use SCOM to monitoring non-domain server/computer. My company told me to do it with only 1 server management that contains others SCOM features. So I have a server Windows 2016 with SCOM with a local domain, and I have to connect the others devices. It seems easy, but I have a problem with certificates: when I try to certificates my server & computers, and I'll import the certificate with MOMCertImport, in Event Viewer I see the event id 21007, that tell me "The OpsMgr Connector cannot create a mutually authenticated connection to 'PC-NAME' because it is not in a trusted domain." So I have the certificates installed but I can't anyway connect Agent to SCOM, What will I do? I search anywhere for this problem, but any solution not work with me!
There are few things you need to look at.
The certificate: must have both client auth and server auth purposes.
Authentication is MUTUAL, i.e. you agent confirms its identity to a gateway, or to a management server, AND the gateway or management server confirms its identity to the agent.
Certificates must be issued to EXACT conputer FQDN. If you rename, or join domain, or change DNS suffix => this will invalidate certificate, because FQDN changes.
Install and bind certificates at both participating servers (i.e. agent and (MS or GW)). This is because #2.
Obviously, you need individual certificates for each server, because of #3.
Ensure, that both servers can maintain trust chanin to own certificate and to other party's one. Ideally, if you have a single root/issuing CA, which used to issue both certificates. In this case, just install root/issuing CA certs in appropriate storages in local computer account. If using self-signed, you need to install them as trusted at other party.
I have been working with web services connecting to URLs provided by different clients and so far it has all been done using one-way authentication. Now I'm asked to enable 2-way (mutual) authentication for one of the clients. I did a lot of research and reading but still confused about a lot of things.
I could test successfully on my local machine following instructions from various different articles. But the problem is now to deploy it in production.
Here's what I did for testing: I created a test Web service Host and assigned it a self-signed certificate and created a client to test this. After this I created a client certificate using makecert and verified that this is installed via MMC. I then modified my Host app to only allow clients with certificate and tested from client to see the connection refused due to not providing the client certificate. Then I modified the bindings in the client application to include the certificate name and I was able to connect to the Host successfully. So this completes local hosting.
Now the real problem. The tech team is going to create a certificate in "cert store" on the server. And I need to test again to make sure everything works as expected. We have a few different developers who all want to test on their machines on their local code. Can we all use the same certificate somehow? I don't think we would be allowed to import the certificate but what suggestions could I give them so all of us can use the same certificate?
I'm also confused about issues like difference between windows certificate and IIS certificate. What advantages would the IIS certificate provide?
Thanks for help!
Edit: Could one of the differences between installing on IIS be so that the hosted sites be accessed via SSL connection? This would mean we don't really need to install on IIS if it's just a client certificate. Is this correct?
I'm having a Windows Store App (Metro App) which I want to connect a web service I built through HTTPS. And I am using a self-signed certificate for my web service. But when I tried to connect it from my App through System.Net.HttpClient.PostAsync I got an exception said
"The underlying connection was closed: Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel."
Inner exception said
"The remote certificate is invalid according to the validation procedure."
I know this is because I'm using a self-signed certificate. I remembered in .NET I can use System.Net.ServicePointManager.ServerCertificateValidationCallback so that my application can pass the validation if the thumbprint is mine.
But I cannot find the relevant class/method in Windows Store runtime. How can I do that?
First, you should ideally be using Windows.Web.HttpClient. On that API, you can use httpClient.HttpBaseProtocolFilter.IgnorableServerCertificateErrors to set the cert errors that you're willing to accept. You can choose to ignore the Untrusted error, for example, but you should then manually check the thumbprint before actually sending any data.
I am planning to implement a small standalone program that will make a https request to a server. Does that require a valid ssl certificate in the client? How does the SSL handshake work in that case? Are there any security issues in the client not have an SSL certificate?
Apart from encrypting the network traffic, HTTPS is normally used to authenticate the server. That is, to give clients reassuring information about who owns the server, etc. For that to work, the client needs to inspect the trust chain in the certificate published by the server. For that to happen automatically, the client machine should have a certificate installed that describes a Certification Authority that issued the server's certificate. Normally such certificates are found on your machine in a store called "Trusted Root Certification Authorities" and most OS come with a set of common CAs already installed.
In addition, many web servers offer a feature where the client can authenticate itself to the server by supplying a client certificate. The web server is able to inspect the certificate coming from the client and map it onto a set of permissions on the server. This "client authentication" is not necessary for a working HTTPS session however, it's just an option.
In short, you don't actually need any certificate on the client, but you will probably want to have a root CA certificate in order to validate the server's identity. If you don't have that certificate it will be impossible for you to trust the server (unless you have another good reason to do so), but you might choose to exchange data with it anyway.
If you wish to learn more about the HTTPS handshake and what is negotiated, i fully recommend you look at this excellent write up at moserware
http://www.moserware.com/2009/06/first-few-milliseconds-of-https.html
A client certificate is required only if the server requires one. A client certificate allows the server to authenticate the client, but this is only useful if the server has a list of all authorized clients. That's generally not the case with a web server, so it's quite rare for them to require client certificates.
When present, the client-side certificate does not affect establishment of the secure channel. (Only the server's certificate is required for that and adding a client certificate into the mix doesn't change the process.) Once a secure channel is established, the server will use the client's certificate the authenticate the client (generally by comparing the client's public key or name with a list of authorized clients).
You dont need a certificate to make a HTTPS connection, but you do need to if you want to know with whom you are communicating.