Re: [PATCH 1/2] http.c: prompt for SSL client certificate password

Constantine Plotnikov [off-list ref] writes:

On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 11:56 AM, Daniel Stenberg[off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On Fri, 12 Jun 2009, Nanako Shiraishi wrote:

quoted

It would be ideal if you can inspect the certificate and decide if you
need to ask for decrypting password before using it (and otherwise you don't
ask). If you can't do that, probably you can introduce a config var that
says "this certificate is encrypted", and bypass your new code if that
config var isn't set.

Is this really a common setup? Using an unencrypted private key sounds like
a really bad security situation to me. The certificate is never encrupted,
the passphrase is for the key.

For SSH using unencrypted private key is very common for scripting and
cron jobs. For HTTPS situation looks like being worse since there is
no analog of ssh-agent that covers at least some of scripting
scenarios. Do we want to disable scripting for HTTPS?

Actually you can use _encrypted_ private keys together with ssh-agent
and for example keychain helper for scripting.  You have to provide
password to all listed private keys only once at login.  I wonder if
something like this would be possible for HTTP certificates...

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland
ShadeHawk on #git