I'm new to site encryption and looking to expend my knowledge about certificates
while surfing online , I've stumbled on this site
when looking on its cert chain it looks legit :
but ... when I capture my SSL handshake with it , one of the certificates is missing :
my question(s) are :
1) how come browser sees cert chain depth 3 with all the details while Wireshark doesn't ?
2) how is it legit the the root issuer is not part of the chain ??
I've tested it using Chrome and Explorer
what am i missing here ?
how come browser sees cert chain depth 3 with all the details while Wireshark doesn't ?
The browser shows the trust path to the locally stored root CA, including this root CA. wireshark showed the certificates sent by the server. While the leaf certificate will be the same the intermediate certificates (and root) might differ depending on what certifaces are trusted by the browser already.
how is it legit the the root issuer is not part of the chain ??
The idea of certificate validation is that you never fully trust the peer, because the peer might by lying to you. Instead you have some local CA certificates (trusted root) and build a trust chain from these to the leaf certificate sent by the server. Only if this trust chain can be build the browser will believe that the server certificate is trustable. This means it is not only legit that the server does not send the root certificate but it is actually wrong if the server includes the root certificate in the chain. It should not harm much though because browsers will simply ignore this useless certificate.
Related
I have a business process which send messages to SAP via soap endpoint exposed by them.
I am using WCF-BasicHttp Send Adapter(In-Process).
As you can see below, earlier the url was http, now they have moved their system to cloud so now they have https endpoints.
I wanted to test this change from http->https, so I have modified the url to https, fill in the credentials for basic auth. it working fine in Test system without SSL Certificate, I need to make sure it wont cause any issue after moving to production system.
My Question is,
1/ Will it work in Production system too as its in TEST without SSL Certificate ?
2/ or Do I need to apply SSL for WCF-BasicHttp Adapter, if yes How can I do that ??
If you are moving to https URL, Certificate is must for SSL/TLS handshake. Many times, Certificate used by specific endpoint is signed by a third party Trusted Root CA e.g. Trustwave, DigiCert etc and these Root CA certs are already trusted on most of the systems. It’s possible in your test system, your endpoint certificate Root CA is already trusted and that’s why you did’t need to install the certificate. In order to check this, you can do following:
Browse your https service url in browser in chrome/IE
Look for Security/Lock sign to find it’s cert. Clicking the lock sign will open certificate.
Check the certificate root by going to Certification Path. You should see a chain of certificates in path. A cert can be by signed by just root CA Or by Intermediary CA first and then root CA. e.g.
—- Trustwave Root
—- Trustwave Intermediary
—- service cert
Or
—- Some Root
—- service cert
Check if Root CA is in your Trusted Root store of system. And Intermediary Cert (if applicable) is in Intermediary Cert Store. You can check this by opening certificate mmc snap-in using mmc command in Windows->Run and adding Certificates snap in of local computer.
If Root CA Cert and Intermediary Certs are not in your system store. SSL/TLS handshake will not complete successfully and BizTalk send port will not work.
If these are installed, you should be good. Otherwise install these certificates in local computer stores.
Another way to verify if endpoint certificate is trusted on a BizTalk system is to login with service account under which your send host is running and then browse the URL in IE. If you don’t get any Cert error, and URL opens such as wsdl URL, then you are good. If you get a cert error, this means end point certificate is not trusted and you need to install the certs as described above.
Some references:
View Certificate
Working with Certificates
I have the company CA signed certificate, intermediate and server certificate in the identity store ( .jks) but still the browser says , cannot be verified by a trusted authority error. Using weblogic -10.3.1 from the weblogic logs i also notice this -
Invalid/unknown SSL header was received from peer x.y.z.12 during SSL handshake
But when I install the root and intermediate certificates into certmgr.msc then when i access the url again in a new window it has no error on the browser and also no error log in the weblogic server.
What could be wrong ?
Global CA's have their root and intermediates recognised by all the modern browsers. However when browser encounter s a certificate whose intermediate and roots aka chain certificates & ca certificates are not a part of its trust store so it fails to chain the leaf certificate to its issuer. So in order to mitigate thi, the roots and intermediates of the company ca must be added so that the browser can verify the complete chain.
Agreed .but thats how the trust works. The company issues ca certificate is known only to your organization but browsers are accessed globally and if you want make the certificate trusted in all the browsers then either you switch to public ca issued certificates or get your root certificate cross signed by a global ca root.
I'm setting up 2-way SSL communication between services on different hosts. Let's say I have my own CA called A. A is trusted by all of my services through a centralized jks. Now let's say I have certificate B signed by A. When services send the certificate should they be sending the entire chain B - A, or just B? I believe both tend to work with most implementations.
I tried to find canonical information about this online, but I'm coming up with nothing.
Thanks for the help
As per tls - Validating an SSL certificate chain according to RFC 5280: Am I understanding this correctly? - Information Security Stack Exchange:
the server should send the exact chain that is to be used; the server
is explicitly allowed to omit the root CA, but that's all.
Reference (RFC 5246 - TLS v1.2, sec. 7.4.2. - Server Certificate):
certificate_list
This is a sequence (chain) of certificates. The sender's
certificate MUST come first in the list. Each following certificate
MUST directly certify the one preceding it. Because certificate
validation requires that root keys be distributed independently, the
self-signed certificate that specifies the root certificate
authority MAY be omitted from the chain, under the assumption that
the remote end must already possess it in order to validate it in
any case.
The idea behind the trusted root CA is that it is trusted. Would you expect the browser to trust anything sent by the server just because it includes a root CA? No!
Therefore the root CA must be already at the client and must be trusted there. It should not be included in the certificate chain by the server, but if you do it anyway browsers will simply ignore it.
I have installed a ssl certificate via WHM on one of my domain. Site is working with https://xyz.com.
However it is not working with https://www.xyz.com. I have checked the certificate and it is for www version as well. After some research it appears to be incomplete chain issue. I had no idea how to resolve this. Please help.
A certificate can contain a special Authority Information Access extension (RFC-3280) with URL to issuer's certificate. Most browsers can use the AIA extension to download missing intermediate certificate to complete the certificate chain. But some clients (mobile browsers, OpenSSL) don't support this extension, so they report such certificate as untrusted.
You can solve the incomplete certificate chain issue manually by concatenating all certificates from the certificate to the trusted root certificate (exclusive, in this order), to prevent such issues. Note, the trusted root certificate should not be there, as it is already included in the system’s root certificate store.
You should be able to fetch intermediate certificates from the issuer and concat them together by yourself. I have written a script to automate the procedure, it loops over the AIA extension to produce output of correctly chained certificates. https://github.com/zakjan/cert-chain-resolver
During SSL handshake, the browser downloads any intermediate certificate from the host web server using the URL provided if needed. I believe browser comes with the pre-installed certificates from public CAs having only the public key of the root certificate.
1) When calling a https url using a standalone java program [https://xyz.com ..which is using Verisign certificate], i do not need to add that Certificate to any truststore since its root public is already available in jdk's cacerts truststore file. Is this correct statement?
2) When i run the same program from application server, it requires to add all the intermediate certificate to server truststore individually. Why this works in different way.
If the trust chain for the servers certificate is: root-intermediate#1-intermediate#2-server and the client (browser) has root as trusted CA in its CA store, it needs a way to verify the servers certificate by checking the complete chain up to the root. And because the client usually has no knowledge of the intermediate CAs the server needs to provide them.
Sometimes it seems to work w/o providing these intermediate CAs. First, the browsers usually cache the intermediate CAs they got and thus if intermediate#2 is the same as already seen by another server the verification will succeed, but only for the clients who visited the other server before :(
Another way is to provide a URL inside a certificate, where the issuer certificate can be downloaded, e.g. server could provide a link to the certificate for intermediate#2, intermediate#2 could provide a link to intermediate#1. In this case the client could download the missing certificates. But, this features is not universally adopted, e.g. some browsers might provide it but SSL libraries outside of the browsers usually don't.