10.2. X.509 certificates

Certificates are an important building block of many network services built on cryptographic protocols, when they need some sort of central authentication.

Among those protocols, SSL (Secure Socket Layer) was invented by Netscape to secure connections to web servers. It was later standardized by IETF under the acronym TLS (Transport Layer Security). Since then TLS continued to evolve, and nowadays SSL is deprecated due to multiple design flaws that have been discovered.

The TLS protocol aims primarily to provide privacy and data integrity between two or more communicating computer applications. The most common case on the Internet is the communication between a client (e.g. a web browser) and a server.

A key par is needed for the exchange of information, which involves a public key that includes information about the identity of the owner and matches a private key. The private key must be kept secret, otherwise the security is compromised. However, anyone can create a key pair, store any identity on it, and pretend to be the identity of their choice. One solution involves the concept of a Certification Authority (CA), formalized by the X.509 standard. This term covers an entity that holds a trusted key pair known as a root certificate. This certificate is only used to sign other certificates (key pairs), after proper steps have been undertaken to check the identity stored on the key pair. Applications using X.509 can then check the certificates presented to them, if they know about the trusted root certificates.

You can implement a CA (as described in 第 10.2.2 节 “公钥基础设施：easy-rsa”), but if you intend to use the certificate for a website, you need to rely on a trusted CA. The prices vary significantly, but it is possible to implement great security spending little to no money.

10.2.1. Creating gratis trusted certificates

Many programs create and use snakeoil certificates by default (see sidebar SECURITY Snake oil SSL certificates). Fortunately the certbot package brings everything we need to create our own trusted certificates, provided by the “Lets Encrypt” initiative (see sidebar CULTURE The Let’s Encrypt Initiative), which can also be used for mail transport agents (Postfix) and mail delivery agents (Dovecot, Cyrus, etc.).

The Falcot administrators just want to create a certificate for their website, which runs on Apache. There is a convenient Apache plugin for certbot that automatically edits the Apache configuration to serve the obtained certificate, so they make use of it:

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CULTURE The Let’s Encrypt Initiative

The Let’s Encrypt initiative is a joint effort to create a free, automated, and open certificate authority (CA), run for the public’s benefit. It is supported by the EFF and the Linux Foundation. The initiative provides an automated tool for acquiring and renewing certificates. This reduces the amount of manual effort involved, especially if multiple sites and domains must be managed. The certificates can also be used for SIP, XMPP, WebSockets and TURN servers. Usage of the service requires control over the DNS information of the domain in question (domain validation).

→ https://letsencrypt.org/how-it-works/

If you would rather keep the server running during the certificate creation, you can use the webroot plugin to get the certificate with the arguments certonly and --webroot. You would have to specify a --webroot-path (abbreviated -w), which should contain the files served. The command looks as follows:

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You need to restart all services using the certificates that you have created.

The certificates created are so called short-life certificates, which are valid for 90 days and must therefor be renewed every once in three months using the certbot renew command. However, we shouldn’t renew every certificate manually, but automatically. A basic cron job is included by certbot in /etc/cron.d/certbot. To ensure that certificates can be automatically renewed, you can execute certbot renew --dry-run.

10.2.2. 公钥基础设施：easy-rsa

It is also possible to create our own CA, for that we will use the RSA algorithm, widely used in public-key cryptography. It involves a “key pair”, comprised of a private and a public key. The two keys are closely linked to each other, and their mathematical properties are such that a message encrypted with the public key can only be decrypted by someone knowing the private key, which ensures confidentiality. In the opposite direction, a message encrypted with the private key can be decrypted by anyone knowing the public key, which allows authenticating the origin of a message since only someone with access to the private key could generate it. When associated with a digital hash function (MD5, SHA1, or a more recent variant), this leads to a signature mechanism that can be applied to any message.

Since public CAs only emit certificates in exchange for a (hefty) fee, it is also possible to create a private certification authority within the company. The easy-rsa package provides tools to serve as an X.509 certification infrastructure, implemented as a set of scripts using the openssl command.

ALTERNATIVE GnuTLS

GnuTLS can also be used to generate a CA, and deal with other technologies around the TLS, DTLS and SSL protocols.

The package gnutls-bin contains the command-line utilities. It is also useful to install the gnutls-doc package, which includes extensive documentation.

Falcot 公司的管理者以此工具添加必要的服务器与客户端认证。可以把所有的客户端配置成类似的状态，因为他们只需信件 Falcot 本地 CA 的认证。此 CA 是率先认证的；为此工作，管理者在适当的地方创建新的文件夹，供 CA 的文件使用，最好放在脱机的地方，杜绝私钥被窃的危险。

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They then store the required parameters into the vars file, which can be uncommented and edited:

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Now we prepare the public key infrastructure directory with the following command:

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The next step is the creation of the CA’s key pair itself (the two parts of the key pair will be stored under pki/ca.crt and pki/private/ca.key during this step). We can add the option nopass to avoid entering a password each time the private key is used:

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The certificate can now be created, as well as the Diffie-Hellman parameters required for the server side of an SSL/TLS connection. They want to use it for a VPN server (see section 第 10.3 节 “虚拟专用网络”) that is identified by the DNS name vpn.falcot.com; this name is re-used for the generated key files (keys/vpn.falcot.com.crt for the public certificate, keys/vpn.falcot.com.key for the private key):

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以上的步骤添加 VPN 客户；每个使用 VPN 的电脑或用户都需有个认证：

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