On 16.12.2015 15:29, Simo Sorce wrote:
On Wed, 2015-12-16 at 07:17 +0100, Jan Cholasta wrote:
On 15.12.2015 18:22, Simo Sorce wrote:
On Tue, 2015-12-15 at 16:23 +0100, Martin Kosek wrote:
On 12/15/2015 08:54 AM, Jan Cholasta wrote:
Hi,
recently I and David discussed the direction of installers with regard to
requesting certificates. Currently there are four (!) different ways of
requesting certificates in the installer [1][2][3][4]. We would like to reduce
it to one.
Since all the certificates are tracked by certmonger and certmonger already
knows how to request certificates from Dogtag (and other CAs), we believe that
all certificates should be requested using certmonger.
Taking our meditation further, we thought "Why not use certmonger for the
cert-request command as well?" What is the benefit, do you ask?
a) single code path for requesting certificates (seriously, the current state
is ridiculous)
b) use any CA supported by certmonger as the IPA CA (i.e. Let's Encrypt [5],
once certmonger gains support for it)
c) automate external CA install, using any CA supported by certmonger [6]
d) support multiple different CAs at once (generalization of the Sub-CA
feature)
e) uniform configuration on clients (configure once, use forever, even for
CA-less)
The idea is to store configuration for the different CAs in LDAP and have
cert-request redirect requests to a proper CA helper according to that
configuration. This would require a new certmonger D-Bus method to call a CA
helper without associated certificate storage, but that should be rather easy
to add. In return, it would be possible to do all of the above.
Note that this should not conflict with tighter integration with Dogtag
(profiles, ACLs, etc.).
Comments are welcome.
Honza
[1]
<https://git.fedorahosted.org/cgit/freeipa.git/tree/ipapython/certmonger.py#n305>
[2]
<https://git.fedorahosted.org/cgit/freeipa.git/tree/ipaserver/install/certs.py#n329>
[3]
<https://git.fedorahosted.org/cgit/freeipa.git/tree/ipaserver/install/certs.py#n355>
[4]
<https://git.fedorahosted.org/cgit/freeipa.git/tree/ipaserver/install/cainstance.py#n878>
[5] <https://fedorahosted.org/freeipa/ticket/5431>
[6] <https://fedorahosted.org/freeipa/ticket/5317>
Interesting idea! I would be definitely interested to hear what Fraser, Rob or
Simo thinks here.
Sounds great to me in principle.
How do you handle CAs that do not have automatic workflows for csr
handling ?
That's the reason we did the 2 step process (in reference to [6])
This could be handled by a dummy "manual" CA helper in certmonger, which
would dump the CSR into the filesystem and wait for the user to provide
the signed certificate in the filesystem and resume the certmonger request.
As you pointed out, we currently do the same, although manually, in
external CA install. It is also done when renewing the externally signed
CA certificate - this time it is done using certmonger, but it is
handled by the dogtag-ipa-ca-renewal-agent helper rather than a separate
helper.
The reason why we did the 2 step process is that it can take days in
some cases to get back a cert given a csr.
I do not think it is safe to wait for days mid-install.
At the very least we'll need to be able to stop the install and resume
it when the certs are available.
I'm not suggesting to wait, we don't wait in ipa-cacert-manage when
renewing the CA certificate either. We can monitor the status of the
certmonger request and interrupt the install when it reaches
NEED_GUIDANCE (which means user intervention is needed).
--
Jan Cholasta
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