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An Introduction to OpenSSL Programming, Part I of II

Issue 89

From Issue #89
September 2001

Sep 01, 2001  By Eric Rescorla
 in
Do you have a burning need to build a simple web client and server pair? Here's why OpenSSL is for you.
What's Missing

In this article, we've only scratched the surface of the issues involved with using OpenSSL. Here's a (nonexhaustive) list of additional issues.

A more sophisticated approach to checking server certificates against the server hostname is to use the X.509 subjectAltName extension. In order to make this check, you would need to extract this extension from the certificate and then check it against the hostname. Additionally, it would be nice to be able to check hostnames against wild-carded names in certificates.

Note that these applications handle errors simply by exiting with an error. A real application would, of course, be able to recognize errors and signal them to the user or some audit log rather than just exiting.

In the next article, we'll be discussing a number of advanced OpenSSL features, including session resumption, multiplexed and nonblocking I/O and client authentication.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Lisa Dusseault, Steve Henson, Lutz Jaenicke and Ben Laurie for help with OpenSSL and review of this article.

Resources

Eric Rescorla has been working in internet security since 1993. He is the author of SSL and TLS: Designing and Building Secure Systems (Addison-Wesley 2000).

______________________

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hello Eric

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 04/26/2010 - 06:05.

Thanks for the great article. You saved me a lot of work. The keys are out of date though. Can you drop a few lines as an appendix or here in comments on how to generate and self-sign new keys?

Best regards,
Reidar

how can check certificate against CRL in Linux using SSL command

laxman's picture
Submitted by laxman (not verified) on Thu, 07/09/2009 - 08:09.

Hi,

How can client checks certificate against CRL(certification revocation List) using SSL libray functions.

I have loaded certifcate using X509_load_cert_crl_file(pLookup,"crl.pem",X509_FILETYPE_PEM);

but i am not getting how client can checks....

Thanks & Regards,
Laxman

Great article, need some info

saleem's picture
Submitted by saleem (not verified) on Thu, 04/03/2008 - 02:41.

Hi,
Your article is simple and yet very informative.
Thanks for the article.

I am new to openssl, i am stuck with a problem. I need some info.

Due to some reasons the cert info is available in a buffer rather than
a file.
My client needs to load this and establish communication with the
server using openssl.

The buffer looks something like this....
char *gacacert =
"MIICLzCCAiswggGUoAMCAQICBgEYgSDT3DANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQUFADA0MRAwDgYD\n\
VQQKEwdlbnRydXN0MQwwCgYDVQQLEwNlbmcxEjAQBgNVBAMTCWdhTG9jYWxDQTAe\n\
Fw0wODAzMDUyMjQ3MzVaFw0yODAyMjkyMjQ3MzVaMDQxEDAOBgNVBAoTB2VudHJ1\n\
c3QxDDAKBgNVBAsTA2VuZzESMBAGA1UEAxMJZ2FMb2NhbENBMIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3\n\
DQEBAQUAA4GNADCBiQKBgQDW4ONrqPZ/Hc9Ft/vL1eD76XpbxhdmAezpjGK0aWa2\n\
2QCkDD6IpU3VxpW93+i8em2zgCV5fujbcJuNebk+Y24q3w8FVbba7BZGcaoatB99\n\
vdZ0gp/t/DXq9KsdxdlE2W/mKBCvxkkMsEnm5kHeHZXByouqPvIXGBsJORCH2ahB\n\
vwIDAQABo0gwRjASBgNVHRMBAf8ECDAGAQH/AgEAMBEGCWCGSAGG+EIBAQQEAwIA\n\
JDAdBgNVHQ4EFgQUIZVCc+92iSwt3CD3P9TYIJB6pLQwDQYJKoZIhvcNAQEFBQAD\n\
gYEAjZq3mZ/Q6F26BBd74Q5lJcABGTM4nB1mThaCJk//dLx6WhmWoXJoZD0//nYM\n\
UDvISCc4KtMZoe5qkO/BKJs9IwsXQyZiPl5bAtcfN6OmSe+fmNPMUKD1ck8l7WLu\n\
7k6hlBwrIIi05KhiYLY5i4ZbVh0+DyjIkXbv2GJj+g0CrEE=";

Could some one tell me how to load this buffer, communicate with the
server and perform the handshake?

Any code sample/example will be great.

Thanks,
Saleem

@ saleem Hi I am facing

Rakesh's picture
Submitted by Rakesh (not verified) on Mon, 11/02/2009 - 02:58.

@ saleem

Hi

I am facing with the same issue.

I tried using this function to create a mem BIO which can be used to read from the memory.
BIO_new_mem_buf((char *){YOUR STRING},-1);

I was able to read the string from the certificate. But the problem was that
when i pass if to SSL_CTX_use_certificate_chain_file it fails.

Please send me any info if you have found a solution already

Thanks
Rakesh

SSLcontext with BSD Sockets

Xtremejames183's picture
Submitted by Xtremejames183 (not verified) on Tue, 06/05/2007 - 18:42.

Hi all,
Great article but i want to know how to attach SSL Context to BSD sockets(socket(),bind(),listen(),connect()..)
Thanks for help

Nice work, Eric. Thank

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon, 06/04/2007 - 15:04.

Nice work, Eric. Thank you.

Just a comment: You looks like John Petrucci (guitarist of Dream Theater band)

Thanks for your nice

duanjigang's picture
Submitted by duanjigang (not verified) on Wed, 11/01/2006 - 03:57.

Thanks for your nice artical, i am learning it

freeing of returned resource in check_cert()

manaz's picture
Submitted by manaz (not verified) on Fri, 08/04/2006 - 09:03.

nice article, but there is a little memory leak in the check_cert() function. pointer returned from SSL_get_peer_certificate must be freed according to man page:

The reference count of the X509 object is incremented by one, so that it will not be destroyed when the session containing the peer certificate is freed. The X509 object must be explicitly freed using X509_free().

Re: An Introduction to OpenSSL Programming, Part I of II

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Wed, 03/24/2004 - 03:00.

Nice article

need more info

Student's picture
Submitted by Student (not verified) on Fri, 04/15/2005 - 10:06.

can u please send me the link of where the next part is ?? that is part 2 of 2 ... thanks for the wonderful tutorial

Re: An Introduction to OpenSSL Programming, Part I of II

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 10/18/2004 - 02:00.

huh!! nice..........

very good , makes it look all

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 07/28/2005 - 05:42.

very good , makes it look all so easy! now to put it into practice

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