Maybe It's Snake Oil All the Way Down

[Eric Rescorla]

"James A. Donald" <jamesd at echeque.com> writes:

> > That's a red herring.  It happens to use X.509 as its
> > preferred bit-bagging format for public keys, but that's
> > about it.  People use self-signed certs, certs from unknown
> > CAs [0], etc etc, and you don't need certs at all if you
> > don't need them, <blatant self-promotion>I've just done an
> > RFC draft that uses shared secret keys for mutual 
> > authentication of client and server, with no need for
> > certificates of any kind</blatant self-promotion>, so the use
> > of certs, and in particular a hierarchical PKI, is merely an
> > optional extra. It's no more required in SSL than it is in
> > SSHv2.
> 
> 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?
>
> What I and everyone else does is use a shared secret, a
> password stored on the server, whereby the otherwise anonymous
> client gets authenticated, then gets an ephemeral cookie
> identifying him..   I cannot seem to find any how-tos or
> examples for anything better, whether for IIS or apache.
http://www.modssl.org/docs/2.8/ssl_howto.html#auth-simple

-Ekr

-- 
[Eric Rescorla                                   ekr at rtfm.com]
                http://www.rtfm.com/

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