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Re: Debian Policy about administrator X.509 certificate stores [was: Re: dovecot-common: please do not use /etc/ssl/certs for end-entity X.509 certificates (/etc/ssl/certs/dovecot.pem)]



On 04/09/2012 10:35 AM, Kurt Roeckx wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 09, 2012 at 09:52:44AM -0400, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
>> On 04/07/2012 12:46 PM, Kurt Roeckx wrote:
>>
>>> At least the certdata.txt file contains the information, you can
>>> edit in iceweasel/firefox.
>>
>> edit at runtime or at compile time?  system administrators ideally
>> shouldn't have to recompile packages in order to add or drop system-wide
>> default reliance on a given CA.
> 
> iceweasel/firefox allows editing it at runtime, just like it
> allows you to add more keys to it's store.  I thnk it's stored in
> cert8.db / cert_override.txt.  But that's all per application /
> user.

Right, so this is not system-wide defaults, so it doesn't satisfy the
need described above.

>> Can you propose a mechanism such that this info would not get lost?
> 
> X509 has a way to embed the trust in the certificate itself, see
> "TRUST SETTINGS" in openssl's x509 manpage.

This looks like it only works with PEM output, and it appends chunks of
(base64-encoded) ASN.1 data after the initial base64-encoded ASN.1 blob
of the certificate.  The header and footer of the PEM output changes
from -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- to -----BEGIN TRUSTED CERTIFICATE-----
which makes it so the certificate apparently can't be read by NSS's
certutil.  A cursory search doesn't turn up any sort of spec for
-----BEGIN TRUSTED CERTIFICATE----- ; do you know if that's documented
somewhere?

	--dkg

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