I need to see how a web application will work with HTTPS. But I can't really find much information around about it. I tried to set up my local Apache but I can't find a CA autorithy to sign my certificate... Hints? Suggestions?
The possibilities to consider are:
Generate your own certificate (self-signed certificate)
Get a certificate issued by a known issuer
Get a certificate issued by an issuer not recognised by the browser
Nr. 1 is probably the most widely used solution. You can find instructions here. The only disadvantage is that browsers will complaint about the unknown CA. In Firefox, you can just add a permanent exception and get rid of the warning. (Neither Chrome nor Internet Explorer seem to provide such option.)
Nr. 2 normally costs money so it isn't a popular choice for dev environments.
Nr. 3 can be obtained for free (see https://www.cacert.org/) but they also trigger a browser warning. A difference with nr. 1 is that you have the possibility of adding the CA to your browser's trusted authorities; however, that's a serious decision that requires serious consideration because of its security implications. In general, I would not recommend it for mere testing.
Self-signed certificates (as already mentioned) are probably the easiest option for a single host.
If there are a few hosts, you could create a mini CA of your own. There are tools for this, for example:
CA.pl: a script provided with OpenSSL.
TinyCA: a tool with a GUI.
Related
I have a need to add system trust for a local CA certificate. This is prompted by a couple of applications but notably curl which warns about untrusted certs when connecting to our CA signed HTTPS endpoints.
I have seen a rainbow of answers on this question with some very ambiguous and vague explanations:
/etc/pki/ca-trust/source/anchors/
This appears to be the most common answer and is described as being "high priority" but there is no explanation to what that means. I can make two guesses, both terrible: one, these are loaded first before the rest but what value does that have? Does any application really interrupt the OS loading of certs stores and have a chance of not getting the 'lower priority' CAs? Two, that there's some swordplay of the blacklisting and whitelisting between the stores. E.g. The blacklist here overrides whitelisting elsewhere, or whitelisting here overrides blacklisting elsewhere. This seems so dangerous as to be unlikely.
/usr/share/pki/ca-trust-source/anchors/
This is "lower priority" than 1 but when should I use this? Always? Never? Does it even matter?
/etc/pki/ca-trust/source/
This is the same as 1 but in a "BEGIN TRUSTED file format"? Presumably this some kind of legacy format but no documentation to that effect. (https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html/security_hardening/using-shared-system-certificates_security-hardening)
/usr/share/pki/ca-trust-source/
Again, same as 2 but "BEGIN TRUSTED file format".
/etc/ssl/certs/ca-bundle.crt
No clue.
/etc/ssl/certs/ca-bundle.trust.crt
Even less clue.
/etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt
Sure, why not. (https://access.redhat.com/solutions/1549003)
/etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.trust.crt
Yep. (Also https://access.redhat.com/solutions/1549003)
/usr/share/pki/ca-trust-source/ca-bundle.trust.crt
It keeps going....
/usr/share/ssl/certs/ca-bundle.crt
Fedora Core 2 only?
Some other SO questions to 'clarify' the issue:
How to add Certificate Authority file in CentOS 7
https://serverfault.com/questions/739980/importing-ca-certificate-chain-crt-rhel7
https://serverfault.com/questions/394815/how-to-update-curl-ca-bundle-on-redhat
https://serverfault.com/questions/1025749/how-to-remove-a-root-ca-certificate
I'm working on automating a web application (F# and Canopy). Getting 'Your connection is not private' screen upon launching the website/ after providing login credentials. Tried a few workaround to have the same disabled, but none did the job. Please help.
The best approach here is not try to hide or cover up the problem, but to fix it properly so you don't have to. Solutions that involve hiding the issue are necessarily going to adversely affect your security.
Note the wording of the error code: ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID. That tells us that the certificate for the site is signed by a non-standard or unknown certificate authority.
You mentioned localhost in your comment; you're not going to be able to get a certificate for that, but you could create a self-signed one, however, if you've enabled the localhost exemption and you're still getting the error, it suggests that you may not be using localhost after all.
So, if you have a certificate signed by a real CA and you're seeing this error, it's likely that your local OS or browser has an outdated CA root certificate bundle. you can usually get the latest one by making sure your OS packages are up to date.
If your certificate is self-signed, then the 'advanced' button will allow you to add an exemption. I you have set up your own CA and signed the certificate with that, you need to add that CA's public key that signed it to your OS.
If you've got a "regular" commercial certificate from verisign, letsencrypt, comodo or whoever, then a run through a testing tool like testssl.sh or Qualys SSL labs will tell you more about what's going wrong. Without knowing the actual domain we can't test anything for you.
Added the following argument and it did the job:
options.AddArguments("--ignore-certificate-errors")
First let me state that I am a Linux noob. I am learning as I go here. Here is my situation. I have an Ubuntu 16lts server, with apache. The software we just installed comes with "samples" These samples are stored in the same directory structure as the program. The instructions have you add an alias and a directory to the apache2 config file. Like so
Alias /pccis_sample /usr/share/prizm/Samples/php
This actually worked :)
However now we want to make sure this site is SSL. I did manage to use openssl to import to Ubuntu the certificates we wanted to use. (i am open to using self signed though at this point its non prod so i dont care)
In trying to find out the right way to tell Apache i want to use SSL for this directory and which cert i want to use. Things went wonky on me. I did manage to get it to use ssl but with browser warning as one would epexct with a self signed cert. I had thought that i could just install the cert on our devs machines and that would go away. But no dice. Now in trying to fix all that i just done broke it. SOOOO What I am looking for is not neccessarily and spoon fed answer but rather any good tools, scripts, articles tips tricks gotchas that i can use to get this sucker done.
Thanks
You need to import your certificate(s) into the browsers trusted store. For each browser on each machine you test with. "What a pain!" you probably think. You are right.
Make it less painful - go through it once. Create your own Certificate Authority, and add that to your browsers trusted certificates/issuers listing. This way, you modify each one once, but then any certificate created by your CA certificate's key will be considered valid by those clients.
https://deliciousbrains.com/ssl-certificate-authority-for-local-https-development/
Note that when configuring Apache or other services, they will still need an issued/signed certificate that corresponds correctly to the hostname that is being used to address them.
Words of warning - consider these to be big, red, bold, and blinking.
DO NOT take the lazy way and do a wildcard, etc. DO keep your key and passphrase under strict control. Remember - your clients will implicitly trust any certificate signed by this key, so it is possible for someone to use the key and create certificates for other domains and effectively MITM the clients.
I am using Firefox 59.0.1 on Ubuntu and I am seeing the following error when accessing my development environment which is behind a self-signed SSL cert.
Your connection is not secure
The owner of crmpicco.dev has configured their website improperly. To
protect your information from being stolen, Firefox has not connected
to this website.
This site uses HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) to specify that
Firefox may only connect to it securely. As a result, it is not
possible to add an exception for this certificate.
Learn more…
Report errors like this to help Mozilla identify and block malicious
sites
crmpicco.dev uses an invalid security certificate.
The certificate is not trusted because it is self-signed.
Error code: SEC_ERROR_UNKNOWN_ISSUER
I have added "crmpicco.dev" to security.tls.insecure_fallback_hosts and set security.enterprise_roots.enabled to true, restarted Firefox but this has had no effect.
I know Chrome has their "badidea"/"thisisnotsafe" workaround, which I know isn't ideal but it at least works - whereas I am yet to find a Firefox equivalent.
What is the solution for this? Do I need to generate new self-signed certs even although the cert I have is from Feb 2018.
I have tried the numerous questions on here and Mozilla support to no effect.
The top level domain *.dev is owned by Google. For some time already there has been a pre-configured HSTS policy in Chrome which made it impossible to use self-signed certificates for this domain. Firefox recently added such policy too so you get the same behavior now.
There are several ways to deal with this. The best way is to not use any currently public or future public top level domains for your private purpose. By using such domains you risk to getting in conflict with usage policies enforced by the domain owner, like enforcing HSTS in case of *.dev. Also, it might even cause security problems. Instead use either domains you actually own or use top level domains which are reserved for internal and test use, like *.test, *.invalid or *.example.
If you really want to use *.dev internally (again, bad idea) you can do it by following the policy of this domain: don't use a self-signed certificate but use a certificate issued by a CA trusted by your browser. This means creating your own CA, adding it as trusted to the browser and then issue the certificates you want by this CA. But again, using public domains you don't own (no matter if top-level or not) is a receipt for trouble.
We are having problems with some browsers attempting to get Bootstrap 3 (js and css) from the documented CDN (https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.2.0/js/bootstrap.min.js). The main two browsers are IE8 and IE9 and we don't have option of telling client to upgrade. Other high level browsers (even IE11) seem to work properly.
We've had to resort to hosting files ourselves, but obviously I would much rather reference the CDN.
For a simple example, in IE11, if I do the following:
1) Type following in url...
2) Hit enter...
3) Click Run...
Now, IE11 will actually continue and run (obviously script will error out), but all these warnings are my best guess as to what might be tripping up IE8/9 (and maybe other lower level browsers). As I said, I've temporarily hosted the files on our own secure.benefittech.com domain, and no warnings occur when I do same steps.
Here are some screen shots from client browser (IE8) when attempting to run the real site referencing CDN urls.
This first one is showing the debugger not knowing what the .tooltip() method is (from Bootstrap.min.js).
Finally, this is the IE security bar warning they get when hitting the site
Any ideas on how this might be resolved or what info I could supply MaxCDN with to try and resolve this would be greatly appreciated - or do we have to continue to host files ourselves?
I realize IE8/9 are old browsers (neither of which I'd be running at this time), but as mentioned earlier, I don't have option to force client to upgrade and surprised no one else has raised this issue (when I contacted MaxCDN, they were surprised by the issue, but not being experienced in Certificate 'technology/language', I didn't really know what to provide them.
Do you have a test environment with IE8/9 where you could do some tests? It could be a problem with certificate chain building. Maybe some certs in the chain are not trusted.
Could you import SubCA certificate from http://secure.globalsign.com/cacert/gsdomainvalsha2g2r1.crt to intermediate CA store and Root CA from http://secure.globalsign.net/cacert/Root-R1.crt?
SubCA certificate (GlobalSign Domain Validation CA - SHA256 - G2) is pretty new (issued 20.02.2014) so if IE8/9 does not follow authority info access from end entity certificate (to build certificate chain) or it does not handle well that the certificate of subCA is in PEM format at http://secure.globalsign.com/cacert/gsdomainvalsha2g2r1.crt (should be DER IMO) or if by any chance GlobalSign Root CA is not trusted by IE8/9 then I believe this could be the reason for the IE warnings.