Author Archives: Paul Kehrer - Page 15

Delete Sends Ctrl-H

Posted by on March 30, 2009 2 comments

Delete Sends Ctrl-H in TerminalIf you’re a Mac user who utilizes Terminal.app with any regularity you have probably run into some Linux servers where the Mac Delete key behaves as forward delete instead of backspace (Ubuntu, Debian, and a few other distributions have this issue). This is a really obnoxious problem, but fortunately there is an easy global fix.

To repair the problem you’ll need to go to the Terminal.app preferences, select settings, then under the default theme you’re using click the advanced tab.  Now you can check the “Delete Sends Ctrl-H” option and close the prefs. Any existing windows will retain the old behavior but new tabs/windows will now behave as expected.

Using OpenSSL s_time

Posted by on March 28, 2009 No comments

Recently I needed to do some performance testing of an SSL instance on a VM. I considered using JMeter, but decided to use OpenSSL to get a rudimentary picture instead.

To obtain a basic result, we connect to the server and pull the /index.php file. You can specify whatever file you’d like to download, or none at all if you simply want to test connections.1

openssl s_time -www /index.php -new -connect www.trustwave.com:443

Your result will look something like this:

No CIPHER specified
Collecting connection statistics for 30 seconds
ttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt
159 connections in 5.82s; 27.32 connections/user sec, bytes read 62328
159 connections in 31 real seconds, 392 bytes read per connection

If you’d like to get more specific with performance testing you can even use the -ciphers parameter to explicitly choose the negotiated cipher. You can obtain a list of available ciphers with “openssl ciphers”.

  1. If you would prefer to reuse connections rather than create a new one for each request replace -new with -reuse. ↩

RSA Encryption and Signing

Posted by on March 21, 2009 1 comment

OpenSSL provides several tools that allow you to RSA encrypt/sign arbitrary data files. Of course, directly RSA encrypting large volumes of data is impractical because the encrypted/signed data cannot exceed the size of the key material. This is one of the reasons why SSL connections typically handshake and then pass an AES (or RC4, et cetera) key to do symmetric encryption thereafter.1

Generate a private key. You can change the last number to the preferred modulus size. Keys greater than 4096-bit will take a long time to generate.2

openssl genrsa -out private.pem 4096

With the private key we can now encrypt the data.

openssl rsautl -encrypt -inkey private.pem -in publicfile -out privatefile

To decrypt just reverse it.

openssl rsautl -decrypt -inkey private.pem -in privatefile -out publicfile

If you would rather sign the data…

openssl rsautl -sign -inkey private.pem -in filetosign -out signed_data

To verify the signature just use -verify.3

openssl rsautl -verify -inkey private.pem -in signed_data
  1. Another big reason is speed. AES is much, much faster than RSA. ↩
  2. If you attempt to encrypt or sign data larger than your key length allows, you will receive an error similar to this: 23465:error:0406D06E:rsa routines:RSA_padding_add_PKCS1_type_2:data too large for key size:rsa_pk1.c:151: ↩
  3. You can also use -hexdump or -raw to view the data in those forms. ↩

Creating a PKCS7 (P7B) Using OpenSSL

Posted by on March 20, 2009 No comments

Continuing the howto nature of this blog (and its peculiar obsession with OpenSSL), here’s a primer on packaging an arbitrary number of certificates into a single PKCS7 container. These files are quite useful for installing multiple certificates on Windows servers. They differ from PKCS12 (PFX) files in that they can’t store private keys. If you need to generate a PKCS12 then head to that article instead.

This example assumes that you have 2 different certificate files, each in PEM (Base64) format. You can add as many -certfile elements as you want to package in the file. Additionally, concatenated certificate chains are supported. 1

openssl crl2pkcs7 -nocrl -certfile cert1.cer -certfile cert2.cer -out outfile.p7b
  1. If you wish to provide DER encoded input files (or have DER output) you can use the -inform DER or -outform DER directives. ↩

Fidgetr 1.0

Posted by on March 15, 2009 No comments

As promised, Fidgetr 1.0 has been released. Here are the improvements since the last time I posted about it:

  • Incremented version to 1.0 to catch users stuck at versions earlier than 0.6.1. Welcome back to the cutting edge!
  • Reworked the crossfade theme JS to fix some bugs and dramatically simplify the code.
  • Photoset support! Display your latest photos or photos from a photoset.
  • Removed requirement for allow_url_fopen. Fidgetr now tries to use the cURL libraries first.
  • Added an AJAX check to warn the user if their Flickr username/email is invalid.
  • Added some advanced CSS in the default theme (visible in Safari 4 only)
  • Fixed a quote issue with fetching comments, thanks lupinehorror!
  • Preliminary i18n support
  • Better compatibility
  • Quite a few minor fixes not listed.

Check out the Fidgetr homepage to download it. Next up on the block, a major update to CDN Tools…

Checking A Remote Certificate Chain With OpenSSL

Posted by on March 14, 2009 1 comment

If you deal with SSL/TLS long enough you will run into situations where you need to examine what certificates are being presented by a server to the client. The best way to examine the raw output is via (what else but) OpenSSL.1

First let’s do a standard webserver connection (-showcerts dumps the PEM encoded certificates themselves for more extensive parsing if you desire. The output below snips them for readability.):

openssl s_client -showcerts -connect www.domain.com:443
CONNECTED(00000003)
--snip--
---
Certificate chain
 0 s:/C=US/ST=Texas/L=Carrollton/O=Woot Inc/CN=*.woot.com
   i:/C=US/O=SecureTrust Corporation/CN=SecureTrust CA
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
--snip--
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
 1 s:/C=US/O=SecureTrust Corporation/CN=SecureTrust CA
   i:/C=US/O=Entrust.net/OU=www.entrust.net/CPS incorp. by ref. (limits liab.)/OU=(c) 1999 Entrust.net Limited/CN=Entrust.net Secure Server Certification Authority
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
--snip--
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
---
Server certificate
subject=/C=US/ST=Texas/L=Carrollton/O=Woot Inc/CN=*.woot.com
issuer=/C=US/O=SecureTrust Corporation/CN=SecureTrust CA
---
No client certificate CA names sent
---
SSL handshake has read 2123 bytes and written 300 bytes
---
New, TLSv1/SSLv3, Cipher is RC4-MD5
Server public key is 1024 bit
--snip--

There’s a lot of data here so I have truncated several sections to increase readability. Points of interest:

  1. The certificate chain consists of two certificates. At level 0 there is the server certificate with some parsed information. s: is the subject line of the certificate and i: contains information about the issuing CA.
  2. This particular server (www.woot.com) has sent an intermediate certificate as well. Subject and issuer information is provided for each certificate in the presented chain. Chains can be much longer than 2 certificates in length.
  3. The server certificate section is a duplicate of level 0 in the chain. If you’re only looking for the end entity certificate then you can rapidly find it by looking for this section.
  4. No client certificate CAs were sent. If the server was configured to potentially accept client certs the returned data would include a list of “acceptable client CAs”.
  5. Connection was made via TLSv1/SSLv3 and the chosen cipher was RC4-MD5. Incidentally, this typically means that the server you’re connecting to is IIS.

But what if you want to connect to something other than a bog standard webserver on port 443? Well, if you need to use starttls that is also available. As of OpenSSL 0.9.8 you can choose from smtp, pop3, imap, and ftp as starttls options.

openssl s_client -showcerts -starttls imap -connect mail.domain.com:139

If you need to check using a specific SSL version (perhaps to verify if that method is available) you can do that as well. -ssl2, -ssl3, -tls1, and -dtls1 are all choices here.2

openssl s_client -showcerts -ssl2 -connect www.domain.com:443

You can also present a client certificate if you are attempting to debug issues with a connection that requires one.3

openssl s_client -showcerts -cert cert.cer -key cert.key -connect www.domain.com:443

And for those who really enjoy playing with SSL handshakes, you can even specify acceptable ciphers.4

openssl s_client -showcerts -cipher DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA -connect www.domain.com:443

The cipher used above should work for almost any Apache server, but will fail on IIS since it doesn’t support 256-bit AES encryption.

  1. The s_client command we’re using opens an interactive socket and does not automatically return to the shell prompt, so remember you will have to hit control-c or type something and hit return to terminate the process. ↩
  2. This example shows an attempted SSLv2 only connection. SSLv2 should be disabled on any web server you control. It has a variety of flaws and has been superseded by SSLv3/TLSv1 for over a decade. ↩
  3. This example expects the certificate and private key in PEM form. You can provide them in DER if you add -certform DER and -keyform DER (OpenSSL 0.9.8 or newer only) ↩
  4. A list of available ciphers can be found by typing “openssl ciphers”, but there are also myriad ways to sort by type and strength. See the ciphers man page for more details. ↩