mirror of
https://gitlab.com/shorewall/code.git
synced 2024-11-28 02:23:20 +01:00
dd7126db82
git-svn-id: https://shorewall.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/shorewall/trunk@1047 fbd18981-670d-0410-9b5c-8dc0c1a9a2bb
89 lines
3.7 KiB
HTML
89 lines
3.7 KiB
HTML
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
|
|
<html>
|
|
<head>
|
|
<title>Shorewall Certificate Authority</title>
|
|
<meta http-equiv="content-type"
|
|
content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
|
|
<meta name="author" content="Tom Eastep">
|
|
</head>
|
|
<body>
|
|
<h1 style="text-align: left;">Shorewall Certificate Authority (CA)
|
|
Certificate</h1>
|
|
<span style="font-weight: bold;">Tom Eastep<br>
|
|
<br>
|
|
</span>Copyright © 2001-2003 Thomas M. Eastep<br>
|
|
<br>
|
|
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
|
|
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
|
|
any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
|
|
Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover, and with no Back-Cover Texts.
|
|
A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “<a
|
|
href="http://shorewall.net/GnuCopyright.htm">GNU Free Documentation
|
|
License</a>”.<br>
|
|
<br>
|
|
2003-12-31<br>
|
|
<hr style="width: 100%; height: 2px;">Given that I develop and support
|
|
Shorewall without asking for any
|
|
renumeration, I can hardly justify paying $200US+ a year to a
|
|
Certificate Authority such as Thawte (A Division of VeriSign) for an
|
|
X.509 certificate to prove that I am who I am. I have therefore
|
|
established my own Certificate Authority (CA) and sign my own X.509
|
|
certificates. I use these certificates on my list server (<a
|
|
href="https://lists.shorewall.net">https://lists.shorewall.net</a>)
|
|
which hosts parts of this web site.<br>
|
|
<br>
|
|
X.509 certificates are the basis for the Secure Socket Layer (SSL). As
|
|
part of establishing an SSL session (URL https://...), your browser
|
|
verifies the X.509 certificate supplied by the HTTPS server against the
|
|
set of Certificate Authority Certificates that were shipped with your
|
|
browser. It is expected that the server's certificate was issued by one
|
|
of the authorities whose identities are known to your browser. <br>
|
|
<br>
|
|
This mechanism, while supposedly guaranteeing that when you connect to
|
|
https://www.foo.bar you are REALLY connecting to www.foo.bar, means
|
|
that the CAs literally have a license to print money -- they are
|
|
selling a string of bits (an X.509 certificate) for $200US+ per
|
|
year!!!I <br>
|
|
<br>
|
|
I wish that I had decided to become a CA rather that designing and
|
|
writing Shorewall.<br>
|
|
<br>
|
|
What does this mean to you? It means that the X.509 certificate that my
|
|
server will present to your browser will not have been signed by one of
|
|
the authorities known to your browser. If you try to connect to my
|
|
server using SSL, your browser will frown and give you a dialog box
|
|
asking if you want to accept the sleezy X.509 certificate being
|
|
presented by my server. <br>
|
|
<br>
|
|
There are two things that you can do:<br>
|
|
<ol>
|
|
<li>You can accept the mail.shorewall.net certificate when your
|
|
browser asks -- your acceptence of the certificate can be temporary
|
|
(for that access only) or perminent.</li>
|
|
<li>You can download and install <a href="ca.crt">my (self-signed)
|
|
CA certificate.</a> This will make my Certificate Authority known to
|
|
your browser so that it will accept any certificate signed by me. <br>
|
|
</li>
|
|
</ol>
|
|
What are the risks?<br>
|
|
<ol>
|
|
<li>If you install my CA certificate then you assume that I am
|
|
trustworthy and that Shorewall running on your firewall won't redirect
|
|
HTTPS requests intented to go to your bank's server to one of my
|
|
systems that will present your browser with a bogus certificate
|
|
claiming that my server is that of
|
|
your bank.</li>
|
|
<li>If you only accept my server's certificate when prompted then the
|
|
most that you have to loose is that when you connect to
|
|
https://mail.shorewall.net, the server you are connecting to might not
|
|
be mine.</li>
|
|
</ol>
|
|
I have my CA certificate loaded into all of my browsers but I certainly
|
|
won't be offended if you decline to load it into yours... :-)<br>
|
|
<br>
|
|
<br>
|
|
<br>
|
|
<br>
|
|
</body>
|
|
</html>
|