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

On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 3:56 AM, Daniel Stenberg[off-list ref] wrote:

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.

And for the libcurl not supporting this, I figure it _could_ be done by
simply letting libcurl prope the remote and see if it can access it without
a passphrase as that would then imply that isn't necessary.

I'm not familiar enough with the code and architecture to deem how suitable
such an action would be.

I don't think it is possible to check to see if it is encrypted from
within git (without calling OpenSSL directly.)  To implement this in
libcurl, a possible solution is to always set
SSL_CTX_set_default_passwd_cb(), and have the callback function prompt
the user on the first call if CURLOPT_KEYPASSWD is not set.  If there
is interest, I could try this out and, if it works, submit a patch for
libcurl.

The upside of doing the prompting in git is that it works with old
libcurl versions... but I'm not sure this is a big deal.  Having it in
libcurl is probably better.


On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 7:42 PM, Nanako Shiraishi[off-list ref] wrote:

Somebody mentioned that your patch forces people to type password
even when the certificate isn't encrypted. How was this issue addressed?

<snip...> 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.

Patch 2/2 gives the user a way to disable this new password prompt.  I
imagine it is a more common for the certificate to be encrypted than
not, so I believe the default should be to prompt.


Mark