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git-svn-id: https://shorewall.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/shorewall/trunk@385 fbd18981-670d-0410-9b5c-8dc0c1a9a2bb
93 lines
3.8 KiB
HTML
93 lines
3.8 KiB
HTML
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
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<html>
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<head>
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<title>Shorewall Certificate Authority</title>
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<meta http-equiv="content-type"
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content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
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<meta name="author" content="Tom Eastep">
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</head>
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<body>
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<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"
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style="border-collapse: collapse;" width="100%" id="AutoNumber1"
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bgcolor="#400169" height="90">
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<tbody>
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<tr>
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<td width="100%">
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<h1 align="center"><font color="#ffffff">Shorewall Certificate Authority
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(CA) Certificate</font></h1>
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</td>
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</tr>
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</tbody>
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</table>
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<br>
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Given that I develop and support Shorewall without asking for any renumeration,
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I can hardly justify paying $200US+ a year to a Certificate Authority such
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as Thawte (A Division of VeriSign) for an X.509 certificate to prove that
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I am who I am. I have therefore established my own Certificate Authority (CA)
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and sign my own X.509 certificates. I use these certificates on my web server
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(<a href="http://www.shorewall.net">http://www.shorewall.net</a>) as well
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as on my mail server (mail.shorewall.net).<br>
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<br>
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X.509 certificates are the basis for the Secure Socket Layer (SSL). As part
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of establishing an SSL session (URL https://...), your browser verifies the
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X.509 certificate supplied by the HTTPS server against the set of Certificate
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Authority Certificates that were shipped with your browser. It is expected
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that the server's certificate was issued by one of the authorities whose identities
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are known to your browser. <br>
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<br>
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This mechanism, while supposedly guaranteeing that when you connect to https://www.foo.bar
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you are REALLY connecting to www.foo.bar, means that the CAs literally have
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a license to print money -- they are selling a string of bits (an X.509 certificate)
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for $200US+ per year!!!I <br>
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<br>
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I wish that I had decided to become a CA rather that designing and writing
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Shorewall.<br>
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<br>
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What does this mean to you? It means that the X.509 certificate that my
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server will present to your browser will not have been signed by one of the
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authorities known to your browser. If you try to connect to my server using
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SSL, your browser will frown and give you a dialog box asking if you want
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to accept the sleezy X.509 certificate being presented by my server. <br>
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<br>
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There are two things that you can do:<br>
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<ol>
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<li>You can accept the www.shorewall.net certificate when your browser
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asks -- your acceptence of the certificate can be temporary (for that access
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only) or perminent.</li>
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<li>You can download and install <a href="ca.crt">my (self-signed) CA
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certificate.</a> This will make my Certificate Authority known to your browser
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so that it will accept any certificate signed by me. <br>
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</li>
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</ol>
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What are the risks?<br>
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<ol>
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<li>If you install my CA certificate then you assume that I am trustworthy
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and that Shorewall running on your firewall won't redirect HTTPS requests
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intented to go to your bank's server to one of my systems that will present
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your browser with a bogus certificate claiming that my server is that of
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your bank.</li>
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<li>If you only accept my server's certificate when prompted then the
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most that you have to loose is that when you connect to https://www.shorewall.net,
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the server you are connecting to might not be mine.</li>
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</ol>
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I have my CA certificate loaded into all of my browsers but I certainly
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won't be offended if you decline to load it into yours... :-)<br>
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<p align="left"><font size="2">Last Updated 11/14/2002 - Tom Eastep</font></p>
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<p align="left"><font face="Trebuchet MS"><a href="copyright.htm"> <font
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size="2">Copyright</font> © <font size="2">2001, 2002 Thomas M. Eastep.</font></a></font></p>
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<br>
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<br>
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</body>
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</html>
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