EKR wrote:
>
> Dr Stephen Henson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > Whereas the current situation is that Netscape supports DSA cient
> > certificates in its browsers but MS doesn't at all. This doesn't help
> > with SSL though.
> Especially since as of 4.6 the Netscape DSA client auth code
> was broken. It generate the DSA signature as concatenated
> r,s rather than as a SEQUENCE OF as it's supposed to.
>
> This may have been fixed in 4.7. I haven't checked.
>
I brought this up in the Netscape newsgroup and got an official
response.
The SSL 3.0 spec says nothing about the format of a DSA signature and so
Netscape says it is using the format of PKCS#11 which they are free to
do so.
They also said they wont "fix" this because it will break interop with
other software. As to what other software I don't know.
OpenSSL could be modified to tolerate this alternative form.
There are actually three different DSA signature formats in use. The
third was used by an old (maybe current?) version of the HotJava browser
(which is virtually unique in that it will support RSA free SSL). This
form is the ASN1 structure but not in the variable length form in SSL.
The fact that this isn't too well known and hasn't been fixed gives some
idea of how widespread non RSA SSL is at present.
The TLS spec BTW removes this ambiguity.
Steve.
--
Dr Stephen N. Henson. http://www.drh-consultancy.demon.co.uk/
Personal Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Senior crypto engineer, Celo Communications: http://www.celocom.com/
Core developer of the OpenSSL project: http://www.openssl.org/
Business Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP key: via homepage.
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