How to make mod_ssl accept self signed certificates - apache

I am using self signed certificates with Apache mod_ssl module but I am getting
> curl_easy_perform() failed on: https://localhost/auth/example (SSL
> certificate problem: self signed certificate)
Is their a way to make ssl not fail? I know that curl has the option --insecure or -k so is there something similar I can add to http-ssl.conf?

mod_ssl will present whatever certificate it is configured to present. It is a client decision whether to accept the presented certificate or not; there is nothing you can configure in mod_ssl, other than the certificate itself, that will influence client verification.
If you want Curl to accept the server certificate, you can either:
Use --insecure/-k (as you are already aware)
Obtain a certificate signed by a public, trusted certificate authority (CA)
Use a self-signed CA to sign the server certificate, and tell Curl to verify the server certificate using that CA via the --cacert <CA certificate> option.

Related

Openssl certificate verification stricter/different than browsers? [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
SSL working in chrome but sometimes in Firefox and not on IOS, Android or Blackberry
(2 answers)
Closed 1 year ago.
I've put together a Linux (Centos 7) server to serve eye-n-sky.net.
Serving content from that site to browsers on Win10 and Linux systems works beautifully. However, when I use openssl to access the site,
openssl s_client -connect eye-n-sky.net:443
the site certificate is rejected,
Verify return code: 21 (unable to verify the first certificate)
I've concluded that the way a browser verifies the certificate is different from what openssl does. Am I on the right track?
I've tested this on three different openssl instances (Debian, Centos, FreeBSD) and have consistent results.
Openssl as a client to other sites, e.g. www.godaddy.com, microsoft.com, work fine, being able to verify the certificate against the installed CA chain.
Believing that I was missing a CA cert, I used the -CAfile option to specify the possibly missing cert, to no effect.
What am I missing? I'm guessing that openssl has a stricter verification discipline, but I don't know where that gets configured.
Thanks,
Andy
Summary: yes, eye-n-sky was providing only it's cert when it needed to include the intermediate and root certs.
However, it took me forever to figure out that my Apache version did not support including the chain in the server cert file. Instead, I had to provide the chain file separately in an SSLCertificateChainFile directive.
OpenSSL's command-line s_client utility has nothing built in to validate the server's certificate. Browsers have a built-in list of trusted certificates to verify the server certificate against.
You have to supply the trusted certificates using options such as -CAfile file or -CApath directory. Per the OpenSSL 1.1.1 s_client man page:
-CApath directory
The directory to use for server certificate verification. This
directory must be in "hash format", see verify(1) for more
information. These are also used when building the client certificate
chain.
-CAfile file
A file containing trusted certificates to use during server
authentication and to use when attempting to build the client
certificate chain.
Note the use of words such as "certificate chain". If you go to godaddy.com you'll see that the server's cert is for *.godaddy.com, but it was signed by Go Daddy Secure Certificate Authority - G2, and that intermediate certificate was signed by Go Daddy Root Certificate Authority - G2 - a different certificate. There's a total of three certificates in that chain.
Verify return code 21 is "no signatures could be verified because the chain contains only one certificate and it is not self signed", so if your CA file only had the certificate from Go Daddy Root Certificate Authority - G2 and not the one from Go Daddy Secure Certificate Authority - G2, OpenSSL would see from the server's cert itself that it was signed by Go Daddy Secure Certificate Authority - G2 and could go no further - it doesn't have that cert to see who signed it.

Root Certificate of website through openssl command

I am trying to obtain the root certificate of various websites for my project, but I am not sure the certificates that I am getting back with this command, contains root certificate or not?
openssl s_client -showcerts -connect google.com:443
I was searching for an answer when I came across a post where wget was used to get the root certificate from the certificate repository of godaddy
wget https://certs.godaddy.com/repository/gd_bundle.crt -O ~/.cert/mail.nixcraft.net/gd.pem
how do i find the repository for every website?
The server must include the certification chain during TLS connection (https). The chain may include the CA root certificate, but it is optional, So you have no guarantee that it will be available. The TLS protocol expects the client to have the certificate in their truststore to verify the trust
You can download the server certificate of every site programmatically, but it is needed to look for the root CA certificate. As you can see, godaddy publish them in its website. In many cases the certificate itself includes a reference to download the root certificate

CA certificate to connect to MQTT server over TLS - iot.eclipse.org

I want to connect to ssl://iot.eclipse.org:8883 using Client certficate authentication.
How I can obtain CA certificate?
Do I require to generate my own client certificate with provided CA certificate.
Or client certificate is also bundled along with CA certificate.
Using openssl to check it appears that the certificate for iot.eclipse.org is from the Let's Encrypt project.
$ openssl s_client -showcerts -connect iot.eclipse.org:8883CONNECTED(00000003)
depth=1 C = US, O = Let's Encrypt, CN = Let's Encrypt Authority X3
verify error:num=20:unable to get local issuer certificate
verify return:0
---
Certificate chain
0 s:/CN=iot.eclipse.org
i:/C=US/O=Let's Encrypt/CN=Let's Encrypt Authority X3
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
So you should be able to check this certificate is valid with the standard CA set in most modern OS/Applications.
You will not be able to get hold of the CA cert/private key to generate your own client certs for obvious reasons and they do not issue client certificates ( and that is assuming that the eclipse.org broker is set up to authenticate clients with the same CA, it doesn't have to).
Also it doesn't make sense to authenticate against this broker as you have no way to set an ACL to control which users can subscribe/publish to specific topics as it's a public demonstration broker. If you want to secure access then you will have to run your own public broker
EDIT: You don't want to do client certificate authentication, you just want to verify the server cert, this is very different.
To do this with mosquitto_pub or mosquitto_sub you have to specify a CA cert or a path to a directory of multiple certificates in order to enable ssl/tls for the connection. You would specify an individual CA cert if you were using a private CA, but since the iot.eclipse.org broker is using a well known public CA you need to specify the path to the system collection of CA certs.
On Linux that is /etc/ssl/certs so you would publish as follows:
mosquitto_pub -h iot.eclipse.org -p 8883 --capath /etc/ssl/certs/ -t testing/ben -m foo
If a certificate is like a passport which proves your identity, then CA is just like a passport office(1). You could consider Verisign, Entrust etc as passport offices. CA certficate is analogous to passport office providing a way to check if a passport is valid or not.
To prove their identity any two parties,( read server and client ), could use certificates. To verify the authenticity of a party( read server ), you need CA certificate. Linux system(Ubuntu) holds commonly used CA certificates at /etc/ssl/certs.
A client certificate is needed only if you need to authenticate yourself to the server. Here server is iot.eclipse.org which doesn't ask for client authentication and so you don't need client certificate.
So, to communicate securely with server ( read TLS ), you can use the CA store present in your system(Ubuntu) as below.
mosquitto_pub -h iot.eclipse.org -p 8883 -t my_topic -m my_message --capath /etc/ssl/certs/

OpenSSL: unable to verify the first certificate for Experian URL

I am trying to verify an SSL connection to Experian in Ubuntu 10.10 with OpenSSL client.
openssl s_client -CApath /etc/ssl/certs/ -connect dm1.experian.com:443
The problem is that the connection closes with a Verify return code: 21 (unable to verify the first certificate).
I've checked the certificate list, and the Certificate used to sign Experian (VeriSign Class 3 Secure Server CA - G3) is included in the list.
/etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
Yet I don't know why it is not able to verify the first certificate.
The entire response could be seen here:
https://gist.github.com/1248790
The first error message is telling you more about the problem:
verify error:num=20:unable to get local issuer certificate
The issuing certificate authority of the end entity server certificate is
VeriSign Class 3 Secure Server CA - G3
Look closely in your CA file - you will not find this certificate since it is an intermediary CA - what you found was a similar-named G3 Public Primary CA of VeriSign.
But why does the other connection succeed, but this one doesn't? The problem is a misconfiguration of the servers (see for yourself using the -debug option). The "good" server sends the entire certificate chain during the handshake, therefore providing you with the necessary intermediate certificates.
But the server that is failing sends you only the end entity certificate, and OpenSSL is not capable of downloading the missing intermediate certificate "on the fly" (which would be possible by interpreting the Authority Information Access extension). Therefore your attempt fails using s_client but it would succeed nevertheless if you browse to the same URL using e.g. FireFox (which does support the "certificate discovery" feature).
Your options to solve the problem are either fixing this on the server side by making the server send the entire chain, too, or by passing the missing intermediate certificate to OpenSSL as a client-side parameter.
Adding additional information to emboss's answer.
To put it simply, there is an incorrect cert in your certificate chain.
For example, your certificate authority will have most likely given you 3 files.
your_domain_name.crt
DigiCertCA.crt # (Or whatever the name of your certificate authority is)
TrustedRoot.crt
You most likely combined all of these files into one bundle.
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
(Your Primary SSL certificate: your_domain_name.crt)
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
(Your Intermediate certificate: DigiCertCA.crt)
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
(Your Root certificate: TrustedRoot.crt)
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
If you create the bundle, but use an old, or an incorrect version of your Intermediate Cert (DigiCertCA.crt in my example), you will get the exact symptoms you are describing.
SSL connections appear to work from browser
SSL connections fail from other clients
Curl fails with error: "curl: (60) SSL certificate : unable to get local issuer certificate"
openssl s_client -connect gives error "verify error:num=20:unable to get local issuer certificate"
Redownload all certs from your certificate authority and make a fresh bundle.
I came across the same issue installing my signed certificate on an Amazon Elastic Load Balancer instance.
All seemed find via a browser (Chrome) but accessing the site via my java client produced the exception javax.net.ssl.SSLPeerUnverifiedException
What I had not done was provide a "certificate chain" file when installing my certificate on my ELB instance (see https://serverfault.com/questions/419432/install-ssl-on-amazon-elastic-load-balancer-with-godaddy-wildcard-certificate)
We were only sent our signed public key from the signing authority so I had to create my own certificate chain file. Using my browser's certificate viewer panel I exported each certificate in the signing chain. (The order of the certificate chain in important, see https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=222086)
Here is what you can do:-
Exim SSL certificates
By default, the /etc/exim.conf will use the cert/key files:
/etc/exim.cert
/etc/exim.key
so if you're wondering where to set your files, that's where.
They're controlled by the exim.conf's options:
tls_certificate = /etc/exim.cert
tls_privatekey = /etc/exim.key
Intermediate Certificates
If you have a CA Root certificate (ca bundle, chain, etc.) you'll add the contents of your CA into the exim.cert, after your actual certificate.
Probably a good idea to make sure you have a copy of everything elsewhere in case you make an error.
Dovecot and ProFtpd should also read it correctly, so dovecot no longer needs the ssl_ca option.
So for both cases, there is no need to make any changes to either the exim.conf or dovecot.conf(/etc/dovecot/conf/ssl.conf)
If you are using MacOS use:
sudo cp /usr/local/etc/openssl/cert.pem /etc/ssl/certs
after this Trust anchor not found error disappears
For those using zerossl.com certificates, drag and drop all certificates (as is) to their respective folders.
Cut and pasting text into existing files, may cause utf8 issues - depending upon OS, format and character spacings.

SSL certificate verification fails, how to figure out what's causing it?

I've recently obtained a PositiveSSL certificate at Namecheap and installed it on my server. Accessing the site from Firefox works fine, but accessing it from Ruby's net/https library doesn't work: it fails to verify the connection certificate even though I've specified the path to the certificate and I've checked that the file is readable. Curl also fails:
curl --cacert /path/to/cert https://mysite.com/
It simply says something like this:
curl: (60) SSL certificate problem, verify that the CA cert is OK. Details:
error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify failed
More details here: http://curl.haxx.se/docs/sslcerts.html
curl performs SSL certificate verification by default, using a "bundle"
of Certificate Authority (CA) public keys (CA certs). If the default
bundle file isn't adequate, you can specify an alternate file
using the --cacert option.
If this HTTPS server uses a certificate signed by a CA represented in
the bundle, the certificate verification probably failed due to a
problem with the certificate (it might be expired, or the name might
not match the domain name in the URL).
If you'd like to turn off curl's verification of the certificate, use
the -k (or --insecure) option.
"certificate verify failed" isn't a terribly useful error message. How do I find out what exactly is wrong with my certificate and what to do about it? I find it confusing that it works in the browser but not anywhere else.
It looks like curl requires that the CA certificate file contains ALL certificates in the chain. I've downloaded all of them and combined them into a single file and now both Curl and Ruby are happy.