Hypereldger fabric admin certs and tls certs expired - hyperledger-fabric

Question

I noticed that HLf admincerts and tls certs, by default, have an expiration date of 1 year. In my case, they have expired and my orderer and peer nodes are giving me a bad certificate error.
Is there any way to do certificate rotation? I don't want to loose any data as the network is in a production enviroment. I am using hyperledger fabric 1.4 version with the raft ordering service.

Answer 1

You can change the default expiry time of an x509 certificate by changing its duration in the fabric-ca-server configuration file. You'll find this file inside CA's docker container.
Reference to the fabric-ca-server configuration file can be found here.
Change the value of expiry from 8760h to xxxx in the signing section of the file. signing section looks like this:
signing:
default:
usage:
- digital signature
expiry: 8760h
profiles:
ca:
usage:
- cert sign
- crl sign
expiry: 43800h
caconstraint:
isca: true
maxpathlen: 0
tls:
usage:
- signing
- key encipherment
- server auth
- client auth
- key agreement
expiry: 8760h
After changing the value of expiry, you'll have to restart your CA container for the changes to take effect.
Once your container is restarted, re-enroll your admin to create a new x509 certificate with the updated expiry duration. You can read about reenrolling an identity from here.
If you want to avoid such scenarios in the future for any user, you can reenroll it before doing a transaction. You can perform the re-enroll operation if the certificate has already expired or going to expire in the next x amount of time.

Answer 2

I am on fabric v2.3 and using Fabric CA.
When we re-enroll the peers, orderer or admin it will generate a new pair of certifcates.
Please correct me if i am wrong, these newly generated certificates needs to be updated in the channel configuration as well? At least this is what the doc says here
I tried to follow the doc and it does contains the root_certs and tls_certs which we need to replace. A usual sample config block after decoding it into json files looks something like this. The respective certs needs to replaced here which seems quite error prone since it's manual and a lot of certs needs to be replaced (depending on the number of peers, orderers, and organisations you've got). And, also not to forget these certs are referenced by the ccp.yaml and ccp.json as well which is used by the fabric sdk.
I am not sure if my understanding is correct about this, as I am struggling with this thing as well. I haven't been able to successfully pull this of as of now. It's strange that hyperledger fabric/Fabric CA doesn't really has a straightforward way of doing this.

Answer 3

Our case: k8s, fabric v2.2, mutual tls requied for all hyperledger connections, certificates expired 3 days ago.
First of all we need to pass through expired tls. Add to the orderer config:
ORDERER_GENERAL_TLS_TLSHANDSHAKETIMESHIFT: 120h
ORDERER_GENERAL_AUTHENTICATION_NOEXPIRATIONCHECKS: "true"
The latest parameter will allow to use expired MSP entities later.
To skip tls checks on the peer side, use the --tlsHandshakeTimeShift 120h parameter.
After the connection was restored, we need to update certificates in the blockchain. Unfortunately there is no analog of the _NOEXPIRATIONCHECKS option for the peer, so we need to use a time-shifted environment. I didn't manage to run the one in the kubernetes, so I had to use a notebook with ntp disabled and port-forwarded orderer endpoint. Be aware that if your kubernetes authentication is token-based, it can stop working because of having the incorrect time. In Azure, this is fixed by getting admin config.
That environment should be enough for step-by-step replaying of your standard certificate rotating scripts. If you don't have any, dive into this issue.