"James A. Donald" <jamesd@echeque.com> writes:
I never figured out how to use a certificate to authenticate a client to a web server, how to make a web form available to one client and not another. Where do I start?
There's a two-level answer to this problem. At an abstract level, doing client certs isn't hard, there are various HOWTOs around for Apache, Microsoft have Technet/MSDN papers on it for IIS, etc etc. At a practical level, it's almost never used because it's just Too Hard. That's not the SSL client-cert part, it's the using-X.509 part. To save having to type in a long explanation, I'll lift a representative paragraph from a (not-yet-published, don't ask :-) paper on PKI usability: There is considerable evidence from mailing lists, Usenet newsgroups and web forums, and directly from the users themselves, that acquiring a certificate is the single biggest hurdle faced by users [1]. For example various user comments indicate that it takes a skilled technical user between 30 minutes and 4 hours work to obtain a certificate from a public CA that performs little to no verification, depending on the CA and the procedure being followed. Obtaining one from non-public CAs that carry out various levels of verification before issuing the certificate can take as long as a month. A representative non-technical user who tried to obtain an (unverified) certificate from a public CA took well over an hour for the process, which involved [...] eventually the user gave up. and that doesn't even get into the mess of managing private keys, handling revocation, etc etc etc ad nauseum: The problems that this creates are demonstrated by what happens when technically skilled users are required to work with certificates. The OpenSSL toolkit [2][3] includes a Perl script CA.pl that allows users to quickly generate so-called clown suit certificates (ones that 'have all the validity of a clown suit' when used for identification purposes [4]), which is widely-used in practice. The cryptlib toolkit [5][6] contains a similar feature in the form of Xyzzy certificates (added with some resistance and only after the author grew tired of endless requests for it), ones with dummy X.500 names, an effectively infinite lifetime, and no restrictions on usage. Most commercial toolkits include similar capabilities, usually disguised as 'test certificates' for development purposes only, which end up being deployed in live environments because it.s too difficult to do it the way X.509 says it should be done. Certificates used with mailers that support the STARTTLS option consist of ones that are 'self-signed, signed-by the default Snake Oil CA, signed by an unknown test CA, expired, or have the wrong DN' [7]. The producer of one widely-used Windows MUA reports that in their experience 90% of the STARTTLS-enabled servers that they encounter use self-signed certificates [8]. This reduces the overall security of the system to that of unauthenticated Diffie-Hellman key exchange, circa 1976. In all of these cases, the entire purpose of certificates has been completely short-circuited by users because it.s just too difficult to do the job properly. The problematic nature of X.509 is echoed in publications both technical and non-technical, with conference papers and product descriptions making a feature of the fact that their design or product works without requiring a PKI. For example, one recent review of email security gateways made a requirement for consideration in the review that the product 'have no reliance on PKI' [9]. As an extreme example of this, the inaugural PKI Research Workshop, attended by expert PKI users, required that submitters authenticate themselves with plaintext passwords because of the lack of a PKI to handle the task [10][11].
As a result we each have a large number of shared secret passwords, whereby we each log into a large number of webservers. Was this what the people who created this protocol intended?
The assumption of the protocol's creators was that someone would figure out how to make X.509 PKI work by the time SSL took off, and everyone would have their own certificates and whatnot. At least they got *most* of the design right :-). Peter. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo@metzdowd.com