Issue #15404 has been updated by Andrew  Parker.

Target version deleted (3.x)

I can't seem to mark this properly as a duplicate of #3143....
----------------------------------------
Feature #15404: Fully support multiple CA's and CA trust chains in Puppet
https://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/15404#change-73309

Author: Jeff McCune
Status: Duplicate
Priority: Normal
Assignee: 
Category: SSL
Target version: 
Affected Puppet version: 0.25.0
Keywords: chain, cacert, localcacert, multipleca
Branch: 


# Overview #

Puppet has [accidentally supported multiple CA 
certificates](http://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/1/wiki/Multiple_Certificate_Authorities)
 and CA chaining up to and including Puppet 2.7.  This support has never been 
"official" though and has always been based on work-arounds.

In order to fully support multiple certificate authorities and chains of trust 
Puppet needs to implement the following behaviors.  All of these separate 
concerns are currently implemented in the localcacert behavior.  Because Puppet 
uses a single self-signed CA certificate by default, a single settings to 
control these concerns makes sense.  To fully support CA chaining and separate 
CA's, however, we need the ability to separate out of the concerns of the 
localcacert setting.

## Distinguish between client and server certificates ##

The default behavior of Puppet in 2.7 and previous versions is to create a 
single self signed CA certificate and use this certificate to issue all other 
certificates.  All certificates issued by the Puppet CA are marked for client 
and server usage.  This means a SSL certificate issued to a Puppet agent is 
able to be re-used as a SSL server certificate.  This is a potential security 
risk as every agent possesses a signed certificate that could be used to serve 
up configuration catalogs to other agents.
First and foremost, all SSL certificates

## Distinguish between client and server SSL settings ##

Puppet is different from the traditional HTTPS model of SSL certificates in 
that both peers mutually authenticate each other using x.509 trust chains.  In 
Puppet 2.7 and earlier the configuration options only allow a single CA 
certificate to be used for both sides of this handshake.  This is the 
localcacert option.

If we are to fully support multiple CA's then we need to expose the ability to 
configure Puppet agent's and Puppet master's with different trusted CA 
certificates.  For example, I may want to issue all client (agent) certificates 
using the CA named "Puppet Agent Signing CA."  Similarly, I may want to issue 
all server (master) SSL certificates using a CA named "Puppet Master Signing 
CA"  In this situation, I could simply point the localcacert setting for agents 
at one file and the localcacert setting for masters at another file but this 
poses a problem for the agent process running on the master itself.  To 
disambiguate this situations I think we need configuration settings such as 
"ssl_client_cacert" and "ssl_server_cacert"

## Distinguish between trusted certificates and authenticating certificates ##

When building a certificate chain we need to distinguish between CA 
certificates we trust and CA certificates we trust to authenticate peer 
connections.  The [Apache SSL 
documentation](http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_ssl.html#SSLCertificateChainFile)
 describes the situation pretty well:

<blockquote>
This directive sets the optional all-in-one file where you can assemble the 
certificates of Certification Authorities (CA) which form the certificate chain 
of the server certificate. This starts with the issuing CA certificate of of 
the server certificate and can range up to the root CA certificate. Such a file 
is simply the concatenation of the various PEM-encoded CA Certificate files, 
usually in certificate chain order.
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
This should be used alternatively and/or additionally to SSLCACertificatePath 
for explicitly constructing the server certificate chain which is sent to the 
browser in addition to the server certificate. **It is especially useful to 
avoid conflicts with CA certificates when using client authentication. Because 
although placing a CA certificate of the server certificate chain into 
SSLCACertificatePath has the same effect for the certificate chain 
construction, it has the side-effect that client certificates issued by this 
same CA certificate are also accepted on client authentication. That's usually 
not one expect.**
</blockquote>

## Support verification depth ##

As soon as we officially support certificate chains, we need to tune how many 
intermediate certification authorities can be used to "fill in" the gap from a 
known authentic CA to a SSL certificate.  This could default to a reasonable 
number (5-7?), but should probably be greater than 1 and less than 10.  It 
should definitely be end-user tunable though.



-- 
You have received this notification because you have either subscribed to it, 
or are involved in it.
To change your notification preferences, please click here: 
http://projects.puppetlabs.com/my/account

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"Puppet Bugs" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to 
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at 
http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-bugs?hl=en.

Reply via email to