Re: SSL: how to tell client what certificate to expect?

On Mon, Nov 01, 2010 at 09:25:41PM -0400, Thor Simon wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 01, 2010 at 11:41:26PM +0000, Bryan Stansell wrote:
> > 
> > Well, if you provide the certificate, it needs to succeed it's
> > authenticity check.  If you don't provide one at all, it falls back to
> > an anonymous cipher (so, it's encrypted, but not authenticated and
> > subject to man-in-the-middle).
> 
> But anyone can man-in-the-middle the client by pretending to be a server
> with no certificate, no?
> 
> Thor

Isn't that what I said?  ;-)

But, taking that a step further, my summary before was off.  In the case
where the client has a certificate and the server doesn't, it's really:

- Client-side certificate only
  - server fails SSL handshake
  - *this just won't work*

The reason?  We disable anonymous ciphers if we load a certificate.  I
haven't looked into the exact reasons (dunno the low-level details of
the SSL protocol - at least not as much as before) but a test showed it
fails the handshake.  Now, if the server ignores this issue, perhaps it
can fake it out.  I assume the client side would fail handshake as well
if the server didn't provide a cert (since it won't accept anonymous
ciphers).  Maybe someone out there knows the protocol.  Otherwise, it'll
require some testing - but this is my best guess right now.  So, I
*think* it's safe to say you're talking to the right server as long as
you have a certificate loaded and the proper CA repository on the client.

I do agree that more hooks to force this would be nice (like, you *must*
validate with this CA or whatever).

Bryan