[Freeipa-users] Re: IPA CA renewal and duplicate CA certs

Fri, 06 Mar 2020 02:17:25 -0800 




> On 4 Mar 2020, at 14:27, Alexander Bokovoy via FreeIPA-users 
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> On ke, 04 maalis 2020, Sigbjorn Lie via FreeIPA-users wrote:
>> Hi Alex,
>> 
>> Thanks for your prompt response.
>> 
>> There are no Debian/Ubuntu systems in our environment.
>> 
>> From your response, is the dual CA cert to be expected / by design?
> 
> Yes, actually, it is to be expected for any setup with external CA root.

This is not an external CA root. I presume both internal and external CA root 
is treated the same then.

> 
>> I have not verified what certificate every application in our
>> environment ends up utilizing yet, as serving both the old and the new
>> CA certificates seem to me to be a bug, and I would rather fix the bug
>> than make workarounds.
> 
> No it is not a bug. It is normal and common to have multiple CA roots
> available in a certificate store. The checks are done against a valid
> CA root for the specific certificate and if you have one issued with the
> use of older CA root certificate, you need to verify against that.

This does not seem to be correct for IPA. As far as I recall there was a 
feature for making sure at that the renewed IPA CA certificate (when using 
self-signed CA cert) continue to work for the existing issued certificates. 
Verifying a certificate that was issues by the old CA against the new CA 
returns OK, and there are no issues connecting to the website.

sudo openssl verify -verbose -CAfile /etc/ipa/ca-new.crt 
/etc/pki/httpd/website1.crt
/etc/pki/httpd/website1.crt: OK

> 
> What I'd like to get clear is why are you pointing the applications to
> /etc/ipa/ca.crt? Supposedly, the content of this file is already a part
> of the system-wide certificate store. On RHEL/CentOS/Fedora systems the
> way how system-wide store works, there are multiple representations that
> are supported by all crypto libraries and frameworks. So you don't need
> to put a direct reference to /etc/ipa/ca.crt.

We have been using IPA in production since 2012. In testing even a couple of 
years earlier. Back then the only place the ca cert was written to the client 
was /etc/ipa/ca.crt, and so this is what has been used in our Puppet setup ever 
since the beginning. The fact that the ipa-client installs the CA certificate 
in the system-wide certificate store is a more recent development. 
(https://pagure.io/freeipa/issue/3504)


> 
>> Back to my original question, what is the reason for keep serving the
>> old certificate? Would it not be sufficient to serve only the new
>> certificate to new clients being enrolled and clients using the
>> ipa-certupdate command?
> 
> It is to allow clients to verify certificates issued with the previous
> CA root certificate. Until you have renewed all certificates issued with
> the old CA root, you need to keep that in place or clients/servers using
> that wouldn't be able to trust the certificate.

This is perhaps true for most PKI setups, however as mentioned, I seem to 
recall that a a feature for making sure at that the renewed IPA CA certificate 
(when using self-signed CA cert) continue to work for the existing issued 
certificates. Again, openssl returns OK when verifying existing certificates 
with the new CA, and there are no issues connecting to the website where this 
is hosted.

sudo openssl verify -verbose -CAfile /etc/ipa/ca-new.crt 
/etc/pki/httpd/website1.crt
/etc/pki/httpd/website1.crt: OK


As this duplicated CA cert is a feature, what will happen when we move pass the 
expiry date of the old CA? Will it be automatically removed from IPA or is 
there any manual cleanup required?


Regards,
Siggi

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