I am implementing mutual authentication between a single client hosted app (CLIENT) and my spring boot 2 application (SERVER). I understand the steps to be as follows:
The server generates a keystore and truststore. The keystore being used for storing the server's certificates and private key. The truststore used for storing other credentials (certificates from certificate authority (CA) or trusted client certificates).
A CSR is raised for the server which is then passed to a CA. The CA generates a signed certificate from the CSR. This is the installed in the server keystore.
The client (which has it's own keystore and truststore) provides their public key to the server. This is then installed in the server truststore.
When a https request is made from client to server:
The client makes a request to access a protected resource.
Server responds with their public certificate.
Client verifies that certificate (looks in truststore and checks if it signed by a trusted CA).
Client presents their public certificate to server.
Server then verifies certificate against their truststore.
Assuming verification success client is granted access to the protected resource.
So I have a few things which I'm a bit confused about...
Are the steps outlined above broadly correct?
How does the server verify the client certificate? (I think it looks at the truststore for that certificate but not sure what actually happens after that).
I've seen examples of the CA certificate being installed in the server truststore instead of the actual client's public certificate ~ is there a use case when this should or should not be done? For my use case I have been provided with a signed certificate from the client (third party). The CA who signed that is different from the CA who signed the server certificate.
Does this process actually authenticate the client i.e. this client can now have access to the servers protected resources but another client who might present a different certificate will not have access? (like a more secure method of providing a username and password)
Where does common name (CN) checking come into all of this? I note in Spring Boot X.509 you can derive a username from the CN and then use this to lookup the appropriate user details from the user details service.
If the client certificate gets compromised for whatever reasons is this managed by just removing it from the server's truststore?
Is there an advantage, in my scenario of using a trusted CA e.g. verisign to produce a client certificate over a self-signed one? i.e. the certificate is passed to me directly from the trusted third party, and then installed.
In respect to your first question, yes your outlined steps are correct! Here is the general mutualSSL flow with a graphical overview: (source)
A client requests access to a protected resource.
The server presents its certificate to the client.
The client verifies the server’s certificate.
If successful, the client sends its certificate to the server.
The server verifies the client’s credentials.
If successful, the server grants access to the protected resource requested by the client.
Your second question (How does the server verify the clients certificate?):
The server verifies the clients certificate with the help of the signature. The signature is usually a hash-value, build of the complete certificate. The hash-value is signed with the private key of a corresponding CA (certificate authority). The server verifies the signature of the client certificate with the help of the CA's public certificate.
Your third question (Servers truststore containing the clients public key/certificate or the corresponding CA certificate?):
If you use for example self-signed certificates, you probably have to import the clients public key/certificate directly into the servers truststore. If your client uses an CA signed certificate, it is appropriate for you server to store the CA public key/certificate only, because it is used to verify the clients certificate.
Your fourth question (Does this process actually authenticate the client): Yes! As you can see in the answer to your second question, the certificate is verified by checking the signature. The signature is a hash over the complete certificate. A standard X.509 contains information to identify the subject. By checking the signature the subject is authenticated. A standard X.509 certificate contains amongst other things e.g. this information:
Subject name, Subject Public Key Info, Public Key Algorithm, Issuer Unique Identifier (optional), ...
Your fifth question (Where comes CN checking?): The CN (common name) verification is executed during the certificate check. The CN identifies the valid hostname for the current certificate. It is limited to one entry. As an extension the SAN (subject alternative name) was introduced. A certificate can contain more than one SAN. The CN (and the SAN) entry is part of the certificate and is verified with the help of the certificates signature check.
Your sixth question (If the client certificate gets compromised for whatever reasons is this managed by just removing it from the server's truststore?): Therefore the CAs use so called revocation lists. If you are using for example self-signed certificates it would also be okay to just remove the compromised certificate entry from the servers truststore.
Your seventh question (Is there an advantage, in my scenario of using a trusted CA e.g. verisign to produce a client certificate over a self-signed one?): There exist a few advantages of using a CA signed certificate instead of self-signed ones.
The certificate and eventually the revocation is managed by the CA
The certificate is valid to every relying party of the public CA, e.g. Verisign
Most of the public CAs offer standardized ways of creating a certificate
Related
I am searching the algorithm about how SSL validation process is performed, but almost everywhere, they explain the certificate validation step as "certificate is checked by client" or something like that, but I wonder what is the scenario behind this.
What I know is:
When the client receives a copy of the certificate that belongs to which website/server you wanna attempt to handshake, there are some indicators that shows the public information of webserver (I think this is for matching the entries in your cached certificate entries, which your browser has installed.)
Once the client matchs a cached-certificate with the webserver's one, it starts validating it. It uses the public key of cached-certificate to decrypt the signature of webserver's one.(? [Not sure this because public keys are used to "encrypt" the data, not decrypt. Also this step may be totally wrong.])
Once it decrypts, it compares the signature between cached one and webserver's one. If it is same, certificate is valid.
I also heard about chains. I really wonder how a chain is known, and how to determine if the webserver's certificate just belongs to a chain.(?)
How SSL certificates are checked by client? I need the answer as step by step and clarified. Thanks :)
Edit:
I think the public key here is used for "decrypting" instead of "encrypting". So a public key is not responsible for encrypting everytime, it can also decrypt and don't encrypt some data. The magic here is that since the public key decrypts here, if you want to fake the certificate, you should have that CA's private key to apply the changes as encrypted (because only private key can encrypt the data). But now, another question comes... What if we decrypt it using webserver's public key, then change the entries in the signature, then encrypt it again using our own private key (we generate it manually, it doesn't belong to server.), which actually make us behave like a CA; and finally overwrite the certificate to hold our own public key which is able to decrypt the data encrypted with our own private key?
There is differences between Encryption and Signature.
Public Key is used by the client to encrypt data that only the server can decrypt with the Private Key of the server.
Public Key is used by the client to verify the signature of the data send by the Server that can only be signed by the Private Key of the server.
When the client wants to access a server, the server send you a certificate containing a public key. The client usually the web browser will check in his integrated CA's list certificates if it contains it.
If it contains it, the client continue and get the CA(Certificate authority)'s that authorized this certificate.
If it not found but the verification of the signature pass, the client will get a warning saying that the certificate is probably self signed and can be malicious.
If the client can't verify the signature, it means the certificate is not valid.
for the chain of trust you can check wikipedia :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_of_trust
you need to be in this chain of trust to be register in the web broswer integrated "database" of CA's.
Hope it answers your question, best regards,
M
Put it simple:
Private Key -> Decrypt and Sign
Public Key -> Encrypt and Verify
Certification Authority
Is the authority that signs and guarantees the authenticity of the certification. If you trust the CA, then you trust also its certificates.
It's the same for friends: if you have a friend that you trust and this tells you "I have a friend that I trust", then you also trust the friend of your friend.
Chain of Certificate Authority.
You can have multiple intermediate CA, for example, you can have
Root Certification Authority
Intermediate Certification Authority for WebServer signed by Root Certification Authority
Web Server Certificate signed by Intermediate Certification Authority for WebServer
Intermediate Certification Authority for signing code, signed by Root Certification Authority
Etc
Why?
Because in case one of the intermediate authorities is compromised you can revoke only its child certificates.
At the enterprise level, each CA has a different level of security, for example, the Root Certification Authority can be stored inside a safe and used only when there are two o more admins.
For the intermediate, instead, maybe only one Admin can manage it.
References
How SSL Works
How HTTPS Works
Wht digital certificates
I would like to know what are the exact steps of certificate authentication over HTTP.
I know this has been asked before, but from what I've read it's still unclear to me how it works.
When first contacting the secure site client will send its certificate
This will be his public key ( let's say a public_key.pem file begginging with ----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY---- )
Server will look whether this certificate has been signed by a trusted CA.
The server only has a list of certificates which it trusts (you configure this keystore when configuring SSL). That is where all private keys are stored. Is this equivalent to all the trusted CAs of the server?
The next step now is to take the public_key.pem and check whether any of the certificates in the keystore have signed it.
If the above process is accurate:
First question: A 'certificate' is a private key signed by another certificate ( or self-signed )
Second question: How exactly does a server validate that a public key was signed with a specific private key ( certificate ) ?
Third question: 'certificate' A can be used to sign another 'certificate' B, consequently 'certificate' B can be used to sign certificate C and so on. If my server has certificate A in its truststore, it means it will also trust public keys coming from certificate B and C ?
Edit based on answer below
My server has cert.pem and privkey.pem. The cert.pem ( x509 certificate ) has been signed by a trusted CA using its private key ( the 'signing' process involves the CA to do 'something' with its private key and sign my Certificate signing request ).
When SSL is negotiatied my server will send the cert.pem to the client ( in some form ). How does the client determine that my public cert was signed by a trusted CA. My truststore pb only contains other public certificates of trusted CAs, so it ends up checking whether my cert.pem was signed using only public certificates of trusted CAs.
This is is the part which is unclear - and I may be missunderstanding the whole process - can a client check if my x509 certificate is valid by just having an x509 list of certificates of trusted CAs?
When first contacting the secure site client will send its certificate
A client doesn't have to send a certificate. Judging from your question, it doesn't sound like you're asking specifically about client-cerificate authentication. In many sites, like if you go to google, stackoverflow, facebook, etc, the client / browser will not send a certificate.
A 'certificate' is a private key signed by another certificate ( or self-signed )
Not quite. A certificate contains a public key that is signed by the private key that corresponds to another certificate.
I think this is worth clearing up. A certificate itself will only ever contain the public key, or the "Subject Public Key Info" in x509 parlance. There is a corresponding private key to that public key that is stored separately from the x509 certificate.
There are some formats that "combine" the certificate and the private key in to a single file, but at this point it isn't a certificate anymore, it's a file containing a certificate - an example of this is PKCS#12. This is a format that can store as many certificates and private keys as needed.
A private key may not even necessarily be a file on disk - it could be in a Hardware Security Module, SmartCard, etc.
'certificate' A can be used to sign another 'certificate' B, consequently 'certificate' B can be used to sign certificate C and so on. If my server has certificate A in its truststore, it means it will also trust public keys coming from certificate B and C ?
Yes. This is called a certificate chain. A is the "root" certificate, B is an "intermediate", and C would be an "end-entity" or "leaf" certificate.
This is very common among HTTPS certificates by CAs. Certificates are never issued directly off the root, they're issued off the intermediate.
How exactly does a server validate that a public key was signed with a specific private key ( certificate ) ?
Well this makes the assumption that a certificate is a private key, which it isn't.
The server, as in the thing serving HTTPS, doesn't really care about the validity of the certificate. It's up to the client to decide if it should trust the certificate the server gives.
The server has the certificate and the corresponding private key. The server can validate that the public key and the private key belong together. How this is done depends on the key type, but the gist of it is, if you know the private key, you can fully reconstruct the public key from it. The server will validate that the private key's "public parts" match the certificate's public key.
The server will present the certificate to the client, like a browser. The browser will check many things, but at minimum it will check two important things:
Can the browser build a chain back to a certificate in the trust store. So the browser will look at the signer of the certificate, called the Issuer, and check if the issuer is in it's trust store. If yes, then the certificate is trusted. If no, it will see if that certificate has an Issuer, and loop all the way down the chain until it reaches the end of the chain, or when it finds something in the trust store. If it reaches the end, then the certificate was not issued by anyone it trusts.
That the certificate is valid for that domain. The certificate contains a Subject Alternative Name (SAN) which indicates what domains the certificate is valid for.
There are lots of other things that get checked, like expiration, revocation, Certificate Transparency, "strength" of the certificate - too many to list.
How does the client determine that my public cert was signed by a trusted CA.
Every client has its own trust store. Internet Explorer on Windows uses the Windows trust store, Google Chrome on macOS and Windows use the operating system trust store (Keychain, Windows Trust Store, etc).
The browser / client needs to build a trust path, as described above. How it does this is a bit complex, but it works out to the Authority Key ID attribute - if it exists, and the Issuer property of the certificate. It uses these values to find the certificate that issued it.
Once it finds the issuing certificate, it checks the signature on the certificate with the issuer's certificate public key.
That issuing certificate could be in the "root" trust store, and uses the public key in the issuing certificate to verify the signed certificate.
Your web server might (probably) send intermediate certificates along with the "main" (leaf) certificate. The client might use these intermediates to build a path back to a certificate that is in the root trust store. Intermediates can only be used as intermediates - you can't send an additional certificate saying "here's the root certificate, trust it".
can a client check if my x509 certificate is valid by just having an x509 list of certificates of trusted CAs?
Yes. That is the trust store. Every browser has / uses one. Firefox has their own trust store called NSS. Operating systems typically have their own trust store, too.
How does the client ensure the ssl certificate that the server send is the true owner of the certificate? How does it prevent a hacker from cloning, for example, the google ssl certificate, and trick me that he is the google site during the handshaking? can the hacker clone the certificate and modify the domain or ip info from network packet to trick people?
An SSL certificate for e.g. www.google.com is signed by a 3rd party named a Certificate Authority (CA). In the case of google that 3rd party is currently "GeoTrust Global CA". Too look up who it is, you need to inspect the certificate (browsers typically will let you do that rather easily, but each has their own way)
That links the certificate with the name "www.google.com".
Your client(s) have a list of CAs they trust on your behalf. That list is either maintained by the vendor of your OS and/or by the creator of your client/browser.
So how does the client know it's talking to the right server ?
The certificate is signed by a CA it trusts, the certificate is for the name the client wants to connect to, and the server delivered proof it knows the corresponding secret key to the public key that's in the certificate.
A hacker who would copy a valid certificate from www.google.com and place it on their own machine would only have the public key and not have the private key.
A hacker who would try to get their certificate request signed by a reputable CA would get rejected because they cannot proof to own the google.com domain. And hence the name would not match.
A hacker who would sign their own certificate request, would fail as their self-built CA is not in the trusted list.
A hacker who would break into google's servers and copy the secret key somehow, could pass muster for a while, but once the folks at Google detect it, they would contact their CA and revoke the certificate.
Now this process is the weak point in most implementations as these revoked certificates are published by the CA as Certificate Revocation Lists (CRLs) or as an OCSP (Online Certificate Status Protocol) service, but clients typically take the shortcut and do not validate that a certificate has not been revoked.
I've read about SSL protocol and now, I know how it encrypts data. But there is something I couldn't understand. With SSL , you're sure you're sending data to and getting data from correct server. But how?
I mean if I create a fake certificate and send it for requests of special website, how do browsers ( or other programs) detect the fake certificate?
Edit: I didn't mean to create a self-signed certificate. I meant how can someone validate my certificate if I create a certificate that its issuer and subject ,etc are something to real certificate! (the only things that are not real is Public key & signature)
TL;DR summary:
Validity of a server certificate is established by:
Host name verification
Verifying the signatures of the entire certificate chain
Performing additional checks on meta data for each certificate
Checking the revocation status of each of the certificates involved
Checking whether the self-signed root certificate of the chain is among the certificates that one trusts by default
Explanation
Let's assume you want to connect to https://mail.google.com (you can try this out in your browser!).
The (real) server will respond with a certificate that is issued to mail.google.com, i.e. in the 'Subject' field of the certificate you will find the Common Name (CN) 'mail.google.com' - cf. RFC 5280 for details on the fields of certificates. The fact that the subject is linked to the site URL is very important for the security of the whole model, and it is actively checked by your TLS implementation ("host name verification"), because otherwise there would be room for Man-In-The-Middle attacks. I.e. somebody could acquire an otherwise valid certificate and impersonate mail.google.com without you taking any notice of it.
In addition to the host name verification, your TLS implementation will also check the "validity" of the certificate. The whole procedure is rather complex and does include checking the trustworthiness of the certificate, but additionally a lot of other things will be checked, more on that in a minute.
If you view Google Mail's certificate in your browser, you will notice that there are actually three certificates shown:
mail.google.com
Thawte SGC CA
Class 3 Public Primary Certification Authority (VeriSign)
The model is that there are a few (well, unfortunately not so few anymore) trusted root certificate authorities ("root CAs") that either you could choose on your own or (more likely) that come preconfigued with your software (e.g. browser) that are blindly trusted. These trusted authorities form the anchors of the entire trust model of "PKI" (Public Key Infrastructure). The basic idea is that the trusted entities may issue certificates to other authorities and grant them permission to again issue certificates (these authorities are called intermediate certificate authorities). The intermediate CAs may again recursively apply this procedure up to a certain point, the number of intermediate CAs between an actual end entity certificate and a root CA certificate is generally limited.
At one point, an intermediate CA will issue certificates to an "end entity" ("mail.google.com" in our example). Now the process of issuing a certificate actually means that the party requesting a certificate will create a public/private key pair first, and use them to authenticate a certificate request that is sent to the certificate authority. The issuing authority creates a certificate for the subordinate entity (either intermediate CA or end entity) by "signing" that certificate using its own private key using an asymmetric algorithm such as RSA and by additionally including the public key of the requesting party within the newly generated certificate. The root CA possesses a so called self-signed certificate, i.e. the root CA is the only authority that may sign their own certificate and include their own public key. The private key remains hidden at all times, of course.
The recursive nature of the certificate issuing process implies that for each end entity certificate there is a unique way of establishing a "chain" of certificates that leads up to a root certificate authority. Now when you are presented with an end entity certificate while trying to connect to a TLS-secured site, the following procedure will be applied recursively until you end up with a root CA certificate:
Find the certificate of the authority that issued the certificate to be validated (see RFC 5280 for details). If none is found: exit with error.
Take the public key of the issuing certificate and verify the signature of the to-be-validated certificate using this public key.
Check a lot of additional things such as whether the certificate has neither expired nor is it not valid yet, "policy constraints", "key usages", "extended key usages"... (again, the gory details are in the RFC).
Certificate revocation status (more on that later)
If all checks were positive, you will ultimately end up with a certificate being self-signed, i.e. where the subject is also the issuer (such as the VeriSign certificate in our example). Now the last thing you have to verify is whether this certificate is among those that you blindly trust: if it is, all is well and the connection will succeed, if it is not, the connection attempt will be rejected.
As if this were not complicated enough already, the checks described so far do not handle cases where once valid certificates suddenly become rogue, examples being cases where a certificate is stolen or private keys are compromised (think of Comodo and DigiNotar). In these cases, the normal procedure is to "revoke" those certificates gone bad, that is you want to mark them as being invalid starting from a distinct point in time (they will expire at some point anyway, but for the remainder of that period they shall already be marked as invalid). For these cases, CAs have the possibility to issue CRLs (a catalog of certificates declared as invalid) or OCSP responses (information for one or in rare cases a set of certificates) that provides clients with information whether a given certificate has been marked as invalid or not. The revocation status needs to be checked for all certificates in a chain, should one of them be marked as invalid then the end entity certificate cannot be trusted and the connection must be rejected as well.
SSL certificates are signed by a certificate authority (CA), which is someone the user already trusts (or more likely, the people who designed their operating system trusts).
The CA digitally signs the certificate using public key encryption. The basic explanation is that the CA has a "private key", and a "public key" that everyone knows. Via some math I don't understand, the CA can create a signature using its private key which can easily be verified with its public key (but the public key can't be used to create a new signature).
When you get an SSL certificate from a server, you get the server's public key, and a signature from a CA saying that it's valid (along with some other info). If you know and trust that CA, you can check the signature and determine if it's valid. You can also use a certificate revocation list to make sure it wasn't revoked.
So basically, you can recognize a bad SSL certificate because it isn't signed by a certificate authority that you trust.
Any fake certificate you create will be a self-signed certificate.
The browser will display big scary warnings when connecting to a site with a self-signed certificate which the user will promptly ignore.
In order to avoid warnings, you need a certificate signed by a certificate authority that the browser trusts, such as VeriSign.
These companies will hopefully make sure that you actually own the domain for the certificate they're signing.
Re: Edit: You can only create a non-self-signed certificate if you get it signed from a trusted CA.
They will refuse to sign a certificate for a different subject.
Process from my understanding:
server sends servers public key
server sends certificate (all information encrypted by trusted CA with their private key)
Your PC decrypts certificate with public key (built into OS from trusted CA)
Your PC hashes (with sha1 and sha256) the servers public key
Your PC compares the hashes of servers public key with certificate stored hash, if not same browser will block site
Your PC compares allowed domains from certificate and the domain, if not allowed, if not same browser will block site
Your PC compares valid date from certificate and your date, if not valid browser will block site.
To fake this you would either need to:
obtain a CA private key (extremely hard to get),
be a CA,
be part of the 5 eyes (Government intelligence agency alliance) and ask a CA for their private key
So if you see a padlock in the address bar you are almost always safe.
Certificates work because they follow a chain of trust. Certificates have a chain of one or more issuers that are trusted; this chain is the backbone of why it works at all. Browsers and nearly all SSL certificate libraries do this chain check, or at least provide the option to.
Self-signed certificates (or those issued by chains that end in a self-signed certificate) would fail this check.
My question is about certificates specifically in ssl but I think the questions should apply to all certificates. I have included the SSL procedure for the sake of clarity.
In SSL this is what I understand the procedure is:
1)Client
sends supported crypto algorithms
sends client nonce
Server
chooses (and sends) a
symmetric algorithm
a public key algorithm
a MAC algorithm
sends it's certificate
sends server nonce
Client
verifies certificate
Extracts public key
Generates a pre-master secret key (pms)
encrypts with servers public key and sends
Client and Server
compute master secrete (MS) from PMS and nonces
PMS sliced to generate two encryption & two mac keys
Client
sends a mac of all handshakes (to ensure they were not previously modifide)
Server
sends a mac of all handshakes
Question
What stops a man in the middle attack from happening at step two? Why can't a man in the middle, say trudy, capture the certificate sent by the server and change the public key in it (to something it has the private key to).
I assume that the certificate is encrypted somehow.
However the server cannot encrypt the certificate because the client does not have the public key yet. When the server gets the key from an authority (like veri-sign) would the key be pre-encrypted using verisign's public key? I think this should work because all web browsers should have the public keys of most authorities.
No, the certificate is not encrypted. But it is signed by a certification authority (CA). Since those check the information included in the certificate (especially the URL to which the cert belongs), there shouldn't be a second valid certificate for a given URL.
The cert of the CA is checked against a trust store (e.g. in your browser). If this truststore is compromised, or if you trust not valid certificates, there is no protection against man in the middle attacks
Certificates are signed by some trusted authority, such as Verisign.
The certificates for these root authorities are built right into the browsers when you download them. You can view the root certificates in Firefox, for example, by going to tools-->options-->advanced-->encryption-->view certificates-->authorities.
If any one of these root-certificate authorities is compromised, however, you are right that a certificate could be forged, making a man-in-the-middle attack possible.
You actually pointed out a weak spot of PKI.
Say Trudy is in the middle of you and yourbank (bank.com). Trudy can change the public key at will at step 2 but the certificate's signature will be invalid. So Trudy has to find a way to generate the signature again. It's safe to say that the trusted CAs will not do this for him. So he has to sign with a fake CA, which is not trusted by your browser. This is still safe theoretically.
However, most browsers (especially IE 6) display a vague security warning and most people don't understand and just ignore, according to some tests.