Saturday 31 January 2015

CA Certificates - The tale of the invisible certificate

I've been through a memory upgrade on my 5-year old PC. My goal is to set up a few VMs running simultaneously, because I need to widen my scope for experimentation. I found out my BIOS has an incompatibility with the memory DIMMs currently available, but fortunately a friend lent me 8GB, so I can start working now, while I try to sort out this mess.

As I set up each VM, I'm importing my bookmarks, so that I have my net environment available "everywhere". And I've come across a curious situation, regarding certificates.

One of the URLs I have on my bookmarks is https://www.ddo.com/forums. The first time I accessed it on Firefox, I got an error message:
Peer's certificate has an invalid signature. (Error code: sec_error_bad_signature)

Using openssl s_client, I checked that ddo.com sends only its own certificate, not the chain, so I looked up the chain in IE, and checked the intermediate CA on Firefox's certificate store. It was there, but it was a different certificate - different signature, different validity (both valid, because the validities on both certificates overlapped), different issuer, only the subject was the same.

I exported that CA certificate from IE, and ran openssl verify using each CA certificate; using the one from Firefox certificate store, I got an error; using the site's CA certificate, the validation succeeded.

So, I imported the site's CA certificate to Firefox, accessed the site, and all was well again.

Then, I checked Firefox's certificate store. And I only found the exact same certificate that was there already, and which wasn't previously validating ddo.com's certificate. Except that now it was.

And much scratching of head ensued.

Until yesterday, when discussing this at lunch with a friend, he told me the obvious: "Well, if you imported it, and the site's certificate is now correctly validated, then it must be there, even if you can't see it". And that gave me a memory jolt, to an issue I had a little more a year ago, with Sun One's web server certificate store, where we had two certificates for the same CA, but only one was visible on the web console. In order to correctly see both, I had to use certutil on the command line.

And in this case, the solutions was the same:

certutil -L -d sql:path to Firefox profile directory -n certificate subject

Which promptly listed the two certificates.

And another Mystery of the Universe was solved during a meal.

I don't understand why the GUI shows just one certificate. I'm not going to say it's stupid because it may be a reasonable decision, based on knowledge I don't have. But to completely hide the fact that a CA has two simultaneously valid certificates on the store is terribly misleading, it's definitely not what I'd call a good solution.

In the end, it was command line to the rescue... as usual.

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