Setting https on expressjs PEM routines:PEM_read_bio:no start line - node.js

A few similar threads exist but none has a checked answer or much discussion. I'm trying to setup an https server on express js but I'm getting
crypto.js:100
c.context.setKey(options.key);
^
Error: error:0906D06C:PEM routines:PEM_read_bio:no start line
I generated my .csr and .key files with
openssl req -nodes -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout myserver.key -out myserver.csr
One suggestion was to convert the .csr to a .pem by following these instructions: http://silas.sewell.org/blog/2010/06/03/node-js-https-ssl-server-example/
That didn't work.
The express.js docs (http://nodejs.org/api/https.html) show both of these files as .pem, however. If that's the issue, how would you convert a .key file to a .pem? This threat is partially helpful How to get .pem file from .key and .crt files? but if anyone knows what expressjs requires, I feel that's the missing component.
How would I check that the files are properly in ANSI, or convert them if not?
There is also some discussion on whether the file should begin with -----BEGIN ENCRYPTED PRIVATE KEY----- or -----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
Any help is greatly appreciated.

So i think there's at least a little bit of terminological confusion, and the node.js example you have there doesn't help by renaming everything to .pem.
Here's a general overview for how SSL works:
You generate a pair of public and private keys. For our purposes the former is your "certificate signing request" (CSR for short) and the latter is your private signing key (just "your key").
If you wanted to generate a self-signed certificate (this is useful for local testing purposes) you can turn around and use your key and your CSR to generate a certificate. This link http://www.akadia.com/services/ssh_test_certificate.html has a pretty clear run down of how to do that on a *nix based system.
For the purposes of web browsers, SSL certificates need to be co-signed by a trusted authority, e.g. a Certificate Authority (CA). You pay a CA to co-sign your cert, and vouch for your authenticity with browser vendors (who will in turn display a green padlock for your site when your website presents its certificate to browsers).
The co-signing process starts with you uploading your CSR to your CA. They will then take that CSR and generate your certificate. They will then provide you with a couple of certificates, your certificate, their root certificate, and possibly some intermediate certificates.
You then need to form a combined certificate that proves a chain of authenticity back to browsers. You do this literally just by concatenating your certificate, followed by the intermediate certificates (in whatever order was specified) ending with the root certificate. This combined certificate is what you hand to your web server.
In order to enable your web server to serve over SSL, you need to hand it your (combined) certificate as its public encryption key (which it provides to web browsers upon request), and your private encryption key, so that it can decrypt the traffic sent to it by web browsers.
So. Now with all of that in mind, you should take that CSR that you have and provide it to your CA, and get the various certificates back, concatenate them, and then use that w/ your private key in your express server.

Related

Cross-platform code-signing of .tar.gz file using OpenSSL?

I'm adding automatic upgrades to an application of mine. I need code-signing for this, or else automatic upgrades could be an attack vector. I need the signing and verification to be doable with "openssl" commands, since my application can run on any platform, and OpenSSL is available on any platform. However, when I try to verify a timestamp with openssl, with the code-signing certificate I bought from Comodo, I get the error "Verify error:unable to get local issuer certificate". The commands I run are as follows:
First, I extract the private key and the certificates from the .p12 file from Comodo, with the following:
openssl pkcs12 -in full-certs-from-comodo.p12 -nocerts -out private-key.pem
openssl pkcs12 -in full-certs-from-comodo.p12 -nokeys -out certs.pem
Then, to query and verify a timestamp, I run:
openssl ts -query -data mydata.tar.gz -cert -CAfile certs.pem -sha256 -out request-256.tsq
cat request-256.tsq | curl -s -S --data-binary #- -H 'Content-Type: application/timestamp-query' 'http://timestamp.comodoca.com?td=sha256' > response-256.tsr
openssl ts -verify -sha256 -in response-256.tsr -data mydata.tar.gz -CAfile certs.pem
This is the full error that results:
Verification: FAILED
140710242829968:error:2F06D064:time stamp routines:TS_VERIFY_CERT:certificate verify error:ts_rsp_verify.c:246:Verify error:unable to get local issuer certificate
Comodo tech support can't solve it, and I've been communicating with them for a month now. Digicert says they can only sign certain kinds of files, and those don't include a .tar.gz file. *sigh*
I've never used code-signing before, but that doesn't sound right to me, unless Digicert is adding artificial restrictions. Can't I hash any file, sign the hash with a private key, and then verify it on the user end with the public key? I don't think it should be this hard. What don't I understand?
Anyway, I'd love to get this working even with a paid certificate vendor, but failing that I'm wondering if I can just create my own key pair (a la PGP) and use that. I guess I wouldn't be able to revoke the certificate; are there any other downsides? In particular, does anyone see any reduced security by doing it this way? I do need very good security for this app.
The application is a Perl script and normally runs on a Web server, i.e. usually a *nix platform, but can also run on Windows.
Thanks! I appreciate any clues in getting this working at all, in any way, paid or not. I can't be the first person to need this kind of code-signing, but Comodo and Digicert tech support seemingly haven't heard of it at all.
Maybe not an answer but definitely too much for comments.
Aside: OpenSSL is available on many platforms, but not all. Although you only care about platforms where your app can be installed, and perl is already pretty demanding of platforms and can't be installed anywhere near everywhere.
More Important: code-signing and trusted timestamping are different and separate things, although sometimes used together: some codesigning schemes like Microsoft and Java encourage (but don't require) you to get a trusted timestamp on the (code) signature; I'm not sure about Apple, or Android. In particular you can't (validly) use a code-signing cert for timestamping, or verifying timestamps, and if you can get a timestamping cert (you probably can't meet the requirements to be trusted by anyone besides yourself, see below) you can't use it for signing or verifying code. Although the error you got on ts is probably not because of this misuse but because you did something else wrong, but you don't tell us what you did, and imagining and describing the very many things you could possibly have done wrong would take far more than is justified for or even fits in a single Stack answer.
The cert can't restrict what you can sign, but it may restrict where that signature will be trusted. In particular for Microsoft Authenticode, only a cert from a CA specifically approved by Microsoft will work. And I believe Apple only trusts certs they themselves issue.
Yes, if you control both/all ends you don't need a 'real' cert; the (only) value of a trusted-thirdparty CA, and certs from it, is allowing your system(s) and/or code to trust data or code from those of other people, and/or other people's to trust yours, under known and more or less reasonable conditions. You presumably trust yourself entirely, unless you're Michael Garibaldi. If you use OpenSSL's 'primitive' signing functions (commandline dgst -sign/verify or rsautl/pkeyutl -sign/verify, or the equivalent library calls) you only need the two keys, private and public. If you use CMS (aka PKCS7) or S/MIME signatures you need a cert, but it can be a self-signed cert with any identity information, true or false, you feel like putting in it.

.KEY and .CSR files but no .CRT file

I'm working migrating a Java app to NodeJS, they are using SSL and they gave me some files related with this:
www.domain.com.key
www.domain.com.csr
But I'm not an expert on this topic, and I'm trying to setting up the SSL certificate with Express but it seems a .CRT file is also required.
I asked them, but they told me that .CRT is actually inside of the .CSR file.
Not sure what should I do to make it work, I've been reading and doing lots of things without success, any idea?
Thanks.
The .key file is probably your PRIVATE key
The .csr file is a CERTIFICATE REQUEST probably signed with your private key
What you need is probably a .crt : a certificate corresponding to your csr signed by a certificate authority (or self signed, depending what you want to accomplish)
node (like another web server) is supposed to ask you 3 thing :
- your private key
- the certificate
- the certificate chain, eventually, depending of the certificate
What you can do is open with a text editor the different files, and see if you see the certificate inside:
you should see things like -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- or -----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY----- or -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE REQUEST----- , that will told you the exact content of the files.

How to use an SSL certificate from wosign in node.js

I'm trying to use a free ssl certificate(s?) I got from wosign in node.js, but I'm having some issues.
I'm creating my server with:
var server = https.createServer({key: serviceKey, cert: certificate}, httpHandler).listen(port)
which works fine with my self-signed certificate. To allow wosign to generate a certificate, I gave them the CSR that was generated alongside my self-signed certificate. They gave me the following files:
root.crt
3_user_my.domain.crt
2_issuer_Intermediate.crt
1_cross_Intermediate.crt
I've also read through the following couple sources to help me along:
https://www.ohling.org/blog/2015/02/wosign-free-2y-ssl-certificate.html
http://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/41289/free-chinese-2-year-ssl-certificate-dv-kuaissl-by-wosign-com
Both mention that the "order" of the certificates is important, but I don't know what they mean there. I assumed that there would be a single certificate I could replace my self-signed certificate with. If there's an order, I assume it goes 1->2->3 as those numbers are in the filenames.
I replaced my certificate with the 3_user_my.domain.crt contents, and it works like my self-signed one - chrome says it should only work on localhost.
So how do I "order" these certs and ultimately how do I use the files given to me so that browsers will recognize it correctly?
Ok, I got it working.
A. I learned that the "certificate" used actually can be multiple certificates (crt files that only have one -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- and one -----END CERTIFICATE-----. So in order to make it work right, I needed to create one certificate file/string that contained 3 of the 4 certificates I got in the right order (apparently the root.crt isn't useful)
B1. The English set of certificate wosign gave me didn't match my private key, which I verified using the following:
openssl x509 -noout -modulus -in yourcertificate.crt | openssl md5
openssl rsa -noout -modulus -in private.key | openssl md5
# If both outputs match, the cert matches the key, otherwise they don't
B2. So I chose the chinese certificate option, and there was a much different set of certs in the archive I got from that. I used the bundled cert for NGINX. And that works!

Why do i have a wrong (sha1) immediate startcom certificate in my chain on azure website?

My immediate certificate on https://paper-shape.com got a weak signature algorithm SHA1: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=paper-shape.com
I followed theses instructions. I created my pfx file both per OpenSSL and per certificate export wizard.
The CRT and pem (immediate certificate from startcom) seem to be ok, because the following command shows "Signature Algorithm: sha256WithRSAEncryption" on both (CRT and PEM):
$ openssl x509 -text -in paper-shape.com.crt
Either something went wrong during my pfx creation process or azure website overrules my immediate certificate.
Has anybody an idea?
Check your locally-installed certificates (on Windows, 'certmgr.msc'). You may have an old SHA-1-signed copy of the StartCom intermediate certificate which is still valid (say, to 2017) and being used in preference to that provided by the server.
You can find (and chain) the SHA-256 intermediate certificate for Class-1 in PEM format, here: https://www.startssl.com/certs/class1/sha2/pem/sub.class1.server.sha2.ca.pem
I have been facing this same problem, I was about to pull my hair out when the certificate seemed to be right in some browsers and OS and in others it claimed I was using SHA-1 and even https://shaaaaaaaaaaaaa.com was telling me that I had a SHA-2 signed crt.
So! Here is a huge thread in StartCom forum about this issue: https://forum.startcom.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=15929&st=0&sk=t&sd=a
The thing is that the browser is using an Intermediate crt that is SHA-1 signed.
The solution: you need to configurate the Intermadiate crt in your server!
You can see more details here:
https://sslmate.com/blog/post/chrome_cached_sha1_chains

What is the main purpose of openssl's SSL_CTX_use_certificate_file?

The man page did not clearly specify this. But looking at openssl's apps implementations, SSL_CTX_use_PrivateKey* calls are usually made after SSL_CTX_use_certificate_file succeeded. I assume this is mostly used at the server side.
I recently confused the above function with SSL_CTX_load_verify_locations wherein you could specify a CA certificate file and path. It turned out that SSL_CTX_load_verify_locations is the one I needed to verify a server certificate which is signed by a Trusted Authority.
SSL_CTX_use_certificate_file() is used to load the certificates into the CTX object either in PEM or DER format. The certificates can be chained ultimately ending at the root certificates. SSL_CTX_use_certificate_file API loads the first certificate into the CTX context;not the entire chain of certificates. If you prefer that thorough check of certificates is needed then you need to opt for SSL_CTX_use_certificate_chain_file()
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/tpfhelp/current/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.ztpf-ztpfdf.doc_put.cur/gtpc2/cpp_ssl_ctx_use_certificate_file.html

Resources