Discuss mailing list

[Erich Eckner <opennic AT eckner.net>]

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On Fri, 22 May 2020, Rouben wrote:

> Hi,

Hi,

> Since you bring up TOFU (Trust On First Use), I wanted to also chime in on
> the whole TLS cert situation.
>
> I think some things have changed since we last looked at it.
>
> 1. There are more ACME service (not just client) implementations available
> than before. For example, Smallstep CA seems like an easier to manage
> implementation that Let’s Encrypt’s
> boulder: https://smallstep.com/certificates/

This sounds good.

> 2. As part of implementing a DNS change, we could ask our users to also
> import our root certs.

Sounds reasonable. <dreaming> Maybe, someday we will enter the root-ca 
bundle of some major browser, though. </dreaming>

> 3. If we use ACME, we can set things up as follows (rough sketch, just off
> the top of my head):
>
> a) root cert - private key on a restricted machine or the CA operator’s
> hardware token like a YubiKey. The public key/self-signed cert for this one
> is published on opennic site and is what we ask our users to trust when they
> deploy our DNS
>
> b) intermediate - valid for 6 months, needs to be semi-automatically renewed
> (resigned) by (a) - CA operator does this with their hardware token/Yubikey
> on a secure, dedicated, offline machine.
>
> c) client certs - valid for 1-3 months, requested and issued exclusively
> through ACME protocol, signed by (b). Private key for (b) lives on ACME
> server.
>
> What are your thoughts?

This sounds good, too. The only downside, I can see, is that we create a 
single point-of-failure with the offline, dedicated root certificate. Is 
there some possibility to share that amongst more than one person 
securely?

Besides the obvious and insecure solution of sending the private key 
around, I only see having multiple such keys (I think 2 would really be 
sufficient) and require the users to import both of them.

regards, Erich

> On Fri, May 22, 2020 at 06:01 Erich Eckner <opennic AT eckner.net> wrote:
>
>       Hi,
>
>       I know, that creating properly trusted ssl certificates for
>       opennic
>       domains is (currently) impossible. But I'd still like to urge
>       the operator
>       of reg.libre to add the reg.libre vhost backend also on https
>       (on any
>       certificate). Because, currently, one is forced to use
>       http://reg.libre,
>       because https://reg.libre brings up the content from a different
>       vhost
>       (after ignoring to the unavoidable certificate warning/error).
>
>       I think, using https with a broken certificate is still safer
>       than using
>       no https at all - it withstands passive eavesdropping, and also
>       one can
>       use tofu to pin the certificate after first use.
>
>       btw: This might be true for other sites within opennic's
>       namespace, so
>       maybe everyone running sites which handle secret data (e.g.
>       login
>       credentials) may want to check their config too :-)
>
>       cheers,
>       Erich
>
>       --------
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> --
> Rouben
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