Re: [Acme] case in point of usability

Stephen Farrell <stephen.farrell@cs.tcd.ie> Wed, 01 April 2015 09:15 UTC

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Date: Wed, 01 Apr 2015 10:15:48 +0100
From: Stephen Farrell <stephen.farrell@cs.tcd.ie>
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To: Carl Mehner <c@cem.me>
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Subject: Re: [Acme] case in point of usability
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Hi Carl,

On 01/04/15 06:16, Carl Mehner wrote:
> If we do want to put these type of considerations in the draft,
> maybe the security considerations section is the best place.
> Something along the lines of:
> 
> When preparing to use the new certificate received from a issuance or
> refresh, the client software should check that the OCSP response from
> the certificate authority is valid before enabling the new certificate
> for use in the server system. If the OCSP response is requested too
> early by the server system, a 'revoked' or 'unknown' OCSP response may
> be cached and cause browsers to fail connection attempts.

Maybe. OTOH, my "client s/w" in this case is the openssl CLI
and that's fairly gigantically crap. I did get it to emit an
OCSP request that was sent somewhere but only ever got an
error response. Before I figured that out I found the set of
postings from other folks who'd suffered the same issue so
I stopped playing.

I'd argue that stuff like this ought be catered for by acme,
but we can have that discussion down the road when/if we're
standardising the protocol in a wg.

S.

PS: My Cullen-moment here was also extended because I got bad
warnings from browsers - FF said "bad issuer" and it was only
when I got to my phone and running the qualsys tests that I
saw that it was actually an ocsp issue.