How to create a public-key infrastructure

Say Alice generates her private key, and extracts her public key:

openssl genrsa -out alice_priv_key.pem 2048
openssl rsa -pubout -in alice_priv_key.pem -out alice_pub_key.pem

Alice then distributes her public key, saying:

To: Bob bob@nice.com From: Alice alice@great.com

Hello everyone,

Here’s my public key! Please use it to send me messages and to verify that future messages are from me.
-----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----
MFwwDQYJKoZIhvcNAQEBBQADSwAwSAJBALdRf5ibmHxq8ggNQ3a+N3v1TjFxAcsO
bD9d6x5Klyo5vfKQ9/HjVwyVgJS8lt7vdHd3NAqU0jID8wCs+htkFl8CAwEAAQ==
-----END PUBLIC KEY-----
Alice

If Bob receives this message in his email inbox, can he trust it? No! It could be from anyone! Nothing in the message demonstrates that this email is really from the person that Bob knows as Alice.

One way for Alice to convince Bob that this is her public key is to deliver the key in person. Alice can visit Bob’s house and hand him the public key on paper.

This method is inconvenient, because Bob lives in London and Alice in Moscow. But Alice knows that Bob trusts her friend Pyotr, and that Bob has Pyotr’s public key. So Alice asks Pyotr to sign her public key. So Pyotr does this:

cat <(echo 'This public key is Alice <alice@great.com>:') alice_pub_key.pem > statement_by_pyotr
$ openssl rsautl -sign -in statement_by_pyotr -inkey pyotr_priv_key.pem -out certificate

Pyotr calls this signed public key a “certificate”. Alice can now embed this certificate in her email to Bob instead:

To: Bob bob@nice.com From: Alice alice@great.com

Hello everyone,

Here’s my public key! Please use it to send me messages and to verify that future messages are from me. I’ve attached my key in the file certificate, which is signed by Pyotr.

Alice

Now when Bob receives this email, he can verify the attached certificate file to get Alice’s public key:

$ openssl rsautl -verify -in certificate -inkey pyotr_pub_key.pem -pubin
This public key is Alice <alice@great.com>:
-----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----
MFwwDQYJKoZIhvcNAQEBBQADSwAwSAJBALdRf5ibmHxq8ggNQ3a+N3v1TjFxAcsO
bD9d6x5Klyo5vfKQ9/HjVwyVgJS8lt7vdHd3NAqU0jID8wCs+htkFl8CAwEAAQ==
-----END PUBLIC KEY-----

In this scheme, Pyotr is acting as a certificate authority (CA). Because Pyotr is trusted by Bob, Pyotr can perform a valuable service for Alice: vouching for Alice’s public key.

In the real world, the certificate authorities are Comodo, Symantec, GoDaddy, and others. Comodo has gotten its public key onto many people’s machines, in the form of “root certificates”. Comodo can therefore perform a valuable service to websites: vouching for that website’s public key, so that other people can communicate with that website. Instead of visiting someone’s house to tie the public key to a real person, Comodo will tie the public key to a domain by verifying ownership of the domain (e.g. with a DNS challenge). Instead of ad hoc signed strings, Comodo and others use X.509, which has proper formats for certificates (amongst other features).

In future posts I’ll look at the req, x509 and ca commands, which are the “proper” way to do PKI.

Tagged .

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How to create a public-key infrastructure

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