Categories
Security Web Site Technologies

Setting up lftp to do ftp over ssl

Intro

I have seen too much advice on the Internet for resolving problems when one encounters erroers of this sort when using the lftp client on linux:

mput: myfile.log: Fatal error: Certificate verification: unable to get local issuer certificate (3E:...)

or this one:

mput: myfile.log: Fatal error: Certificate verification: unable to get issuer certificate (4A:...)

You research that and get a lot of htis that recommend to

“set ssl:verify-certificate false inside the lftp command”

But, you know, security-wise, that isn’t such a hot approach. And you can do better with just a bit more effort.

The details

Examine what certificate the ftp server is using with this openssl command:

$ openssl s_client -showcerts -connect example.com:21 -starttls ftp

The privatre pki scenario

I’m imagining a scenario where yuo are in a world where a private pki reigns. In that case you want to just make sure lftp knows where to find the private root CA and possibly the intermediate CA.

To be continued…

Categories
Admin Network Technologies Web Site Technologies

Examining certificates over explicit proxy with openssl

Intro
This is pretty esoteric, but I’ve personally been waiting for this for a long time. It seems that beginning with openssl 1.1, the s_client sub-menu has had support for a proxy setting. Until then it was basically impossible to examine the certificates your proxy was sending back to users.

The syntax is something like:

openssl s_client -proxy <proxy_ip>:<proxy_port> -servername expired.badssl.com -showcerts -connect expired.badssl.com:443

where the proxy is a standard HTTP proxy.

Why is it a great thing? If your proxy does SSL interception then it is interfering with with the site’s normal certificate. And worse, it can good. What if its own signing certificate has expired?? I’ve seen it happen, and it isn’t pretty…

To find the openssl version just run openssl version.

My SLES12 SP4 servers have a version which is too old. My Cygwin install is OK, actually. My Redhat 7.7 has a version which is too old. I do have a SLES 15 server which has a good version. But even the version on my F5 devices is too old, surprisingly.

References and related
the openssl project home page: https://www.openssl.org/

A few of my favorite openssl commands.

Categories
Admin Linux Security Web Site Technologies

The IT Detective Agency: the vanishing certificate error

Intro
I was confronted with a web site certificate error. A user was reluctant – correctly – to proceed to an internal web site because he saw a message to the effect:

I tried it myself with IE and got the same thing.
Switch to Chrome and I saw this error:

I wouldn’t bother to document this one except for a twist: the certificate error went away in IE when you clicked through to the login page.

Furthermore, when I examined the certificate with a tool I trust, openssl, it showed the date was not expired.

So what’s going on there?

The details
First thing I dug into was Chrome. I found this particular error can occur if you have an internal certificate issued with a valid common name, but without a Subject Alternative Name. My openssl examination confirmed this was indeed the case for this certificate.

So I decided the Chrome error was a red herring. And confirmed this after checking out other internal web sites which all suffered from this problem.

But that still leaves the IE error unexplained.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I created a shortcut bash function that combines several openssl functions I call examinecert:

examinecert () { echo|openssl s_client -servername "$@" -connect "$@":443|openssl x509 -text|more; }

Use it like this:

$ examinecert drjohnstechtalk.com

Certificate:
    Data:
        Version: 3 (0x2)
        Serial Number:
            04:17:21:b7:12:94:3a:fa:fd:a8:f3:f8:5e:2e:e4:52:35:71
    Signature Algorithm: sha256WithRSAEncryption
        Issuer: C=US, O=Let's Encrypt, CN=Let's Encrypt Authority X3
        Validity
            Not Before: Apr  4 08:34:56 2018 GMT
            Not After : Jul  3 08:34:56 2018 GMT
        Subject: CN=drjohnstechtalk.com
        Subject Public Key Info:
            Public Key Algorithm: rsaEncryption
                Public-Key: (2048 bit)
                Modulus:
                    00:d3:50:98:6d:72:03:b2:e4:01:3f:44:01:3d:eb:
                    ff:fc:68:7d:51:a4:09:90:48:3c:be:43:88:d7:ba:
                    ...
        X509v3 extensions:
                 ...
            X509v3 Subject Alternative Name:
                DNS:drjohnstechtalk.com
                ...

I tried to show a friend the error. I could no longer get IE to show a certificate error. So my friend tried IE. He saw that initial error.

Most people give up at this point. But my position is the kind where problems no one else can resolve go to get resolution. And certificates is somewhat a specialty of mine. So I was not ready to throw in the towel.

I mistrust all browsers. They cache information, try to present you sanitized information. It’s all misleading.

So I ran examinecert again. This time I got a different result. It showed an expired certificate. So I ran it again. It showed a valid, non-expired certificate. And again. It kept switching back-and-forth!

Here it helps to know some peripheral information. The certificate resides on an old F5 BigIP load-balancer which I used to run. It has a known problem with updating certificate if you merely try to replace the certificate in the SSL client profile. It’s clear by looking at the dates the certificate had recently been renewed.

So I now had enough information to say the problem was on the load balancer and I could send the ticket over to the group that maintains it.

As for IE’s strange behavior? Also explainable for the most part. After an initial page with the expired certificate, if you click Continue to this web site it re-loads the page and gets the Good certificate so it no longer shows you the error! So when I clicked on the lock icon to examine the certificate, I always was getting the good version. In fact – and this is an example of the limitation of browsers like IE -you don’t have the option to examine the certificate about which it complained initially. Then IE caches this certificate I think so it persists sometimes even after closing and re-launching the browser.

Case closed.

Conclusion
An intermittent certificate error was explained and traced to a bad load balancer implementation of SSL profiles. The problem could only be understood by going the extra mile, being open-minded about possible causes and “using all my senses.” As I like to joke, that’s why I make the medium bucks!

Other conclusion? openssl is your friend.

References and related
My favorite openssl commands show how to use openssl x509 from any linux server.

Categories
Admin Apache Hosting Service Web Site Technologies

Server Name Indication and what it means for those with only a single IP address

Intro
Sometimes everything is there in place, ready to be used, but you just have to either mistakenly try it, or learn it works by reading about it, because it may be counter-intuitive. Such is the case with Server Name Indication. I thought I knew enough about https to “know” that you can only have one key/certificate for a single IP address. That CERT can be a SAN (subject alternative name) CERT covering multiple names, but you only get one shot at getting your certificate right. Or so I thought. Turns out I was dead wrong.

Some details
Well, SNI guess is a protocol extension to https. You know I always wondered why in proxy server logs it was able to log the domain name? How would it know that if the http protocol conversation is all encrypted? Maybe it’s SNI at work.

Who supports it?
Since this is an extension it has to be supported by both server and browser. It is. Apache24 supports it. IE, Firefox and Chrome support it. Even my venerable curl supports it! What does not support it, right out of the box, is openssl. The openssl s_client command fetches a site’s certificate, but as I found the hard way, you need to add the -servername switch to tell it which certificate you want to examine, i.e., to force it to use SNI.

This is mainly used by big hosting companies so they can easily and flexibly cram lots of web sites onto a single IP, but us small-time self-hosted sites benefit as well. I host a few sites for friends after all.

Testing methodology
This is pretty simple. I have a couple different virtual servers. I set each up with a completely different certificate in my apache virtual server setups. Then I accessed them by name like usual. Each showed me their own, proper, certificate. That’s it! So this is more than theoretical for me. I’ve already begun to use it.

Enterprise usage
F5 BigIP supports this protocol as well, of course. This article describes how to set it up. But it looks limited to only one server name per certificate, which will be inadequate if there are SAN certificates.

Conclusion
https using Server Name Indication allows to run multiple virtual servers, each with its own unique certificate, on a single IP address.

References and related
I get my certificates for free using the acme.sh interface to Let’s Encrypt
I’ve written some about apache 2.4 in this post
I don’t think Server Name Indication is explained very well anywhere that I’ve seen. The best dewscription I’ve found is that F5 Devcentral article: https://devcentral.f5.com/articles/ssl-profiles-part-7-server-name-indication
RFC 4366 is the spec describing Server Name Indication.
My favorite openssl commands are listed in this blog post.
SNI is considered insecure because the hostname is sent in plaintext. encrypted SNI is the proposal to address that. Here’s a good write-up about that: https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2018/09/26/finally-a-fix-for-the-encrypted-webs-achilles-heel/?utm_source=Naked+Security+-+Sophos+List&utm_campaign=27caad8932-Naked+Security+daily+news+email&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_31623bb782-27caad8932-418487137

Categories
Linux Security

Verifying a pkcs12 file with openssl

Intro
The easy way

How to examine a pkcs12 (pfx) file

$ openssl pkcs12 ‐info ‐in file_name.pfx
It will prompt you for the password a total of three times!

The hard way
I went through this whole exercise because I originally could not find the easy way!!!

Get the source for openssl.

Look for pkread.c. Mine is in /usr/local/src/openssl/openssl-1.1.0f/demos/pkcs12.

Compile it.

My first pass:

$ gcc ‐o pkread pkread.c

/tmp/cclhy4wr.o: In function `sk_X509_num':
pkread.c:(.text+0x14): undefined reference to `OPENSSL_sk_num'
/tmp/cclhy4wr.o: In function `sk_X509_value':
pkread.c:(.text+0x36): undefined reference to `OPENSSL_sk_value'
/tmp/cclhy4wr.o: In function `main':
pkread.c:(.text+0x93): undefined reference to `OPENSSL_init_crypto'
pkread.c:(.text+0xa2): undefined reference to `OPENSSL_init_crypto'
pkread.c:(.text+0x10a): undefined reference to `d2i_PKCS12_fp'
pkread.c:(.text+0x154): undefined reference to `ERR_print_errors_fp'
pkread.c:(.text+0x187): undefined reference to `PKCS12_parse'
pkread.c:(.text+0x1be): undefined reference to `ERR_print_errors_fp'
pkread.c:(.text+0x1d4): undefined reference to `PKCS12_free'
pkread.c:(.text+0x283): undefined reference to `PEM_write_PrivateKey'
pkread.c:(.text+0x2bd): undefined reference to `PEM_write_X509_AUX'
pkread.c:(.text+0x320): undefined reference to `PEM_write_X509_AUX'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

Corrected compile command
$ gcc ‐o pkread pkread.c ‐I/usr/local/include ‐L/usr/local/lib64 ‐lssl ‐lcrypto

Note that this works for me because I put my ssl and crypto libraries in that directory. Your installation may have put them elsewhere:

$ ll /usr/local/lib64/*.a

-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 4793162 Aug 16 15:30 /usr/local/lib64/libcrypto.a
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root  765862 Aug 16 15:30 /usr/local/lib64/libssl.a

References and related
My favorite openssl commands.

Categories
Linux SLES Web Site Technologies

Compiling curl and openssl on Redhat Linux

Intro
I have an ancient Redhat system which I’m not in a position to upgrade. I like to use curl to test web sites, but it’s getting to the point that my ancient version has no SSL versions in common with some secure web sites. I desperately wanted to upgrade curl while leaving the rest of the system as is. Is it even possible? How would you do it? All these things and more are explained in today’s riveting blog post.

The details
Redhat version
I don’t know the proper command so I do this:
$ cat /etc/system-release

ed Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 6.6 (Santiago)

Current curl version
$ ./curl ‐‐version

curl 7.19.7 (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.19.7 NSS/3.16.2.3 Basic ECC zlib/1.2.3 libidn/1.18 libssh2/1.4.2

Limited set of SSL/TLS protocols
$ curl ‐help

...
 -2/--sslv2         Use SSLv2 (SSL)
 -3/--sslv3         Use SSLv3 (SSL)
...
 -z/--time-cond <time> Transfer based on a time condition
 -1/--tlsv1         Use TLSv1 (SSL)
...

New version of curl

curl 7.55.1 (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.55.1 OpenSSL/1.1.0f zlib/1.2.3

New SSL options

     --ssl           Try SSL/TLS
     --ssl-allow-beast Allow security flaw to improve interop
     --ssl-no-revoke Disable cert revocation checks (WinSSL)
     --ssl-reqd      Require SSL/TLS
 -2, --sslv2         Use SSLv2
 -3, --sslv3         Use SSLv3
...
     --tls-max <VERSION> Use TLSv1.0 or greater
     --tlsauthtype <type> TLS authentication type
     --tlspassword   TLS password
     --tlsuser <name> TLS user name
 -1, --tlsv1         Use TLSv1.0 or greater
     --tlsv1.0       Use TLSv1.0
     --tlsv1.1       Use TLSv1.1
     --tlsv1.2       Use TLSv1.2
     --tlsv1.3       Use TLSv1.3

Now that’s an upgrade! How did we get to this point?

Well, I tried to get a curl RPM – seems like the appropriate path for a lazy system administrator, right? Well, not so fast. It’s not hard to find an RPM, but trying to install one showed a lot of missing dependencies, as in this example:
$ sudo rpm ‐i curl‐minimal‐7.55.1‐2.0.cf.fc27.x86_64.rpm

warning: curl-minimal-7.55.1-2.0.cf.fc27.x86_64.rpm: Header V4 DSA/SHA1 Signature, key ID b56a8bac: NOKEY
error: Failed dependencies:
        libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.14)(64bit) is needed by curl-minimal-7.55.1-2.0.cf.fc27.x86_64
        libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.17)(64bit) is needed by curl-minimal-7.55.1-2.0.cf.fc27.x86_64
        libcrypto.so.1.1()(64bit) is needed by curl-minimal-7.55.1-2.0.cf.fc27.x86_64
        libcurl(x86-64) >= 7.55.1-2.0.cf.fc27 is needed by curl-minimal-7.55.1-2.0.cf.fc27.x86_64
        libssl.so.1.1()(64bit) is needed by curl-minimal-7.55.1-2.0.cf.fc27.x86_64
        curl conflicts with curl-minimal-7.55.1-2.0.cf.fc27.x86_64

So I looked at the libcurl RPM, but it had its own set of dependencies. Pretty soon it looks like a full-time job to get this thing compiled!

I found the instructions mentioned in the reference, but they didn’t work for me exactly like that. Besides, I don’t have a working git program. So here’s what I did.

Compiling openssl

I downloaded the latest openssl, 1.1.0f, from https://www.openssl.org/source/ , untar it, go into the openssl-1.1.0f directory, and then:

$ ./config ‐Wl,‐‐enable‐new‐dtags ‐‐prefix=/usr/local/ssl ‐‐openssldir=/usr/local/ssl
$ make depend
$ make
$ sudo make install

So far so good.

Compiling zlib
For zlib I was lazy and mostly followed the other guy’s commands. Went something like this:
$ lib=zlib-1.2.11
$ wget http://zlib.net/$lib.tar.gz
$ tar xzvf $lib.tar.gz
$ mv $lib zlib
$ cd zlib
$ ./configure
$ make
$ cd ..
$ CD=$(pwd)

No problems there…

Compiling curl
curl was tricky and when I followed the guy’s instructions I got the very problem he sought to avoid.

vtls/openssl.c: In function ‘Curl_ossl_seed’:
vtls/openssl.c:276: error: implicit declaration of function ‘RAND_egd’
make[2]: *** [libcurl_la-openssl.lo] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/usr/local/src/curl/curl-7.55.1/lib'
make[1]: *** [all] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/local/src/curl/curl-7.55.1/lib'
make: *** [all-recursive] Error 1

I looked at the source and decided that what might help is to add a hint where the openssl stuff could be found.

Backing up a bit, I got the source from https://curl.haxx.se/download.html. I chose the file curl-7.55.1.tar.gz. Untar it, go into the curl-7.55.1 directory,
$ ./buildconf
$ PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/ssl/lib/pkgconfig LIBS=”‐ldl”

and then – here is the single most important point in the whole blog – configure it thusly:

$ ./configure ‐‐with‐zlib=$CD/zlib ‐‐disable‐shared ‐‐with‐ssl=/usr/local/ssl

So my insight was to add the ‐‐with‐ssl=/usr/local/ssl to the configure command.

Then of course you make it:

$ make

and maybe even install it:

$ make install

This put curl into /usr/local/bin. I actually made a sym link and made this the default version with this kludge (the following commands were run as root):

$ cd /usr/bin; mv curl{,.orig}; ln ‐s /usr/local/bin/curl

That’s it! That worked and produced a working, modern curl.

By the way it mentions TLS1.3, but when you try to use it:

$ curl ‐i ‐k ‐‐tlsv1.3 https://drjohnstechtalk.com/

curl: (4) OpenSSL was built without TLS 1.3 support

It’s a no go. But at least TLS1.2 works just fine in this version.

One other thing – put shared libraries in a common area
I copied my compiled curl from Redhat to a SLES 11 SP 3 system. It didn’t quite run. Only thing is, it was missing the openssl libraries. So I guess it’s also important to copy over

libssl.so.1.1
libcrypto.so.1.1

to /usr/lib64 from /usr/local/lib64.

Once I did that, it worked like a charm!

Conclusion
We show how to compile the latest version of openssl and curl on an older Redhat 6.x OS. The motivation for doing so was to remain compatible with web sites which are already or soon dropping their support for TLS 1.0. With the compiled version curl and openssl supports TLS 1.2 which should keep it useful for a long while.

References and related
I closely followed the instructions in this stackoverflow post: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44270707/cant-build-latest-libcurl-on-rhel-7-3#44297265
openssl source: https://www.openssl.org/source/
curl sources: https://curl.haxx.se/download.html
Here’s a web site that only supports TLS 1.2 which shows the problem: https://www.askapache.com/. You can see for yourself on ssllabs.com

Categories
Linux Web Site Technologies

curl showing its age with SSL error

Intro
I’ve used curl as a debugging tool for a long time. But time moves on and my testing system didn’t. So now for the first time I saw an error that is produced by this situation, and I will explain it.

The details

The error

$ curl ‐i ‐k https://julialang.org/

curl: (35) error:1407742E:SSL routines:SSL23_GET_SERVER_HELLO:tlsv1 alert protocol version

$ curl ‐help

...
 -2/--sslv2         Use SSLv2 (SSL)
 -3/--sslv3         Use SSLv3 (SSL)
...
 -1/--tlsv1         Use TLSv1 (SSL)
...

Compare this to a server which I’ve kept up-to-date with openssl and curl:

...
 -2/--sslv2         Use SSLv2 (SSL)
 -3/--sslv3         Use SSLv3 (SSL)
...
 -1/--tlsv1         Use =&gt; TLSv1 (SSL)
    --tlsv1.0       Use TLSv1.0 (SSL)
    --tlsv1.1       Use TLSv1.1 (SSL)
    --tlsv1.2       Use TLSv1.2 (SSL)
...

On this server I can fetch the home page with curl.

So it appears the older system does not have a compatible version of TLS. To confirm this use SSLLABS. We see this:

SSLLabs evaluation of julialang.org

Sure enough, only TLS 1.2 is supported by the server, and my poor old curl doesn’t have that! Too bad for me, but it shows it’s time to upgrade.

Another problem site
askapache.com is another vexing site. On a curl version which supposedly supports tls 1.2 I get this error:
$ curl ‐‐tlsv1.2 ‐‐verbose ‐k https://askapache.com/

* About to connect() to askapache.com port 443 (#0)
*   Trying 192.237.251.158... connected
* Connected to askapache.com (192.237.251.158) port 443 (#0)
* Initializing NSS with certpath: sql:/etc/pki/nssdb
* warning: ignoring value of ssl.verifyhost
* NSS error -12286
* Closing connection #0
* SSL connect error
curl: (35) SSL connect error

This is with curl version 7.19.7 on my CentOS 6.8 system.

This same site works fine on my compiled version of curl with the latest openssl, version 7.55.1. The system-supplied curl is missing support for some cipher suites.

Here’s my compiled curl and openssl list of cipher suites:
$ openssl ciphers

ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:
ECDHE-ECDSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:ECDHE-RSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:DHE-RSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:
ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:
ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA:
ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:RSA-PSK-AES256-GCM-SHA384:
DHE-PSK-AES256-GCM-SHA384:RSA-PSK-CHACHA20-POLY1305:DHE-PSK-CHACHA20-POLY1305:
ECDHE-PSK-CHACHA20-POLY1305:AES256-GCM-SHA384:PSK-AES256-GCM-SHA384:PSK-CHACHA20-POLY1305:
RSA-PSK-AES128-GCM-SHA256:DHE-PSK-AES128-GCM-SHA256:AES128-GCM-SHA256:PSK-AES128-GCM-SHA256:
AES256-SHA256:AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-PSK-AES256-CBC-SHA384:ECDHE-PSK-AES256-CBC-SHA:SRP-RSA-AES-256-CBC-SHA:SRP-AES-256-CBC-SHA:RSA-PSK-AES256-CBC-SHA384:DHE-PSK-AES256-CBC-SHA384:RSA-PSK-AES256-CBC-SHA:
DHE-PSK-AES256-CBC-SHA:AES256-SHA:PSK-AES256-CBC-SHA384:PSK-AES256-CBC-SHA:ECDHE-PSK-AES128-CBC-SHA256:ECDHE-PSK-AES128-CBC-SHA:SRP-RSA-AES-128-CBC-SHA:SRP-AES-128-CBC-SHA:
RSA-PSK-AES128-CBC-SHA256:DHE-PSK-AES128-CBC-SHA256:RSA-PSK-AES128-CBC-SHA:DHE-PSK-AES128-CBC-SHA:AES128-SHA:PSK-AES128-CBC-SHA256:PSK-AES128-CBC-SHA

and what I see on my older system:
$ openssl ciphers

DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:DHE-DSS-AES256-SHA:AES256-SHA:DHE-RSA-CAMELLIA256-SHA:DHE-DSS-CAMELLIA256-SHA:
CAMELLIA256-SHA:EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA:EDH-DSS-DES-CBC3-SHA:DES-CBC3-SHA:DES-CBC3-MD5:
DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:DHE-DSS-AES128-SHA:AES128-SHA:DHE-RSA-CAMELLIA128-SHA:DHE-DSS-CAMELLIA128-SHA:
CAMELLIA128-SHA:RC2-CBC-MD5:RC4-SHA:RC4-MD5:RC4-MD5:EDH-RSA-DES-CBC-SHA:EDH-DSS-DES-CBC-SHA:DES-CBC-SHA:
DES-CBC-MD5:EXP-EDH-RSA-DES-CBC-SHA:EXP-EDH-DSS-DES-CBC-SHA:EXP-DES-CBC-SHA:EXP-RC2-CBC-MD5:EXP-RC2-CBC-MD5:EXP-RC4-MD5:EXP-RC4-MD5

Note that when curl successfully connects it shows which cipher suite was chosen if you use the -v switch:

$ curl ‐v ‐k https://drjohnstechtalk.com/

* About to connect() to drjohnstechtalk.com port 443 (#0)
*   Trying 50.17.188.196... connected
* Connected to drjohnstechtalk.com (50.17.188.196) port 443 (#0)
...
* SSL connection using TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256
...

On a more demanding server – one that does not work with old curl, this dialog is longer, TLS 1.2 is preferred and a more secure cipher suite is chosen – one not available on the other system:

(issue standard curl -k -v <server_name>)

*   Trying 50.17.188.197...
* TCP_NODELAY set
* Connected to 50.17.188.197 port 443 (#0)
* ALPN, offering http/1.1
* Cipher selection: ALL:!EXPORT:!EXPORT40:!EXPORT56:!aNULL:!LOW:!RC4:@STRENGTH
* TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS handshake, Client hello (1):
* TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS handshake, Server hello (2):
* TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS handshake, Certificate (11):
* TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS handshake, Server key exchange (12):
* TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS handshake, Server finished (14):
* TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS handshake, Client key exchange (16):
* TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS change cipher, Client hello (1):
* TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS handshake, Finished (20):
* TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS handshake, Finished (20):
* SSL connection using TLSv1.2 / ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384

Another curl error explained
While running

$ curl -v -i -k https://drjohnstechtalk.com/

* About to connect() to drjohnstechtalk.com port 443 (#0)
*   Trying 50.17.188.196... connected
* Connected to drjohnstechtalk.com (50.17.188.196) port 443 (#0)
* Initializing NSS with certpath: sql:/etc/pki/nssdb
* warning: ignoring value of ssl.verifyhost
* skipping SSL peer certificate verification
* SSL connection using TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256
* Server certificate:
*       subject: CN=drjohnstechtalk.com,C=US
*       start date: Apr 03 00:00:00 2017 GMT
*       expire date: Apr 03 23:59:59 2019 GMT
*       common name: drjohnstechtalk.com
*       issuer: CN=Trusted Secure Certificate Authority 5,O=Corporation Service Company,L=Wilmington,ST=NJ,C=US
&gt; GET / HTTP/1.1
&gt; Host: drjohnstechtalk.com
&gt; Accept: */*
&gt; User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; InfoPath.1; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30;
&gt;
* SSL read: errno -5961
* Closing connection #0
curl: (56) SSL read: errno -5961

What’s going on?
In this test drjohnstechtalk.com was behind a load balancer. The load balancer had SSL configured. The back-end server was not running however though the load balancer’s health check did not detect that condition. So the load balancer permitted the initial connection, but then shut things off when it could not open a connection to the back-end server. So this error has nothing to do with curl showing its age, but I didn’t know that when I started debugging it.

errno 104
Then there’s this one:

$ curl ‐v ‐i ‐k https://lb.drjohnstechtalk.com/

*   Trying 50.17.188.196...
* TCP_NODELAY set
* Connected to fw-change-request.bdrj.net (50.17.188.196) port 443 (#0)
* ALPN, offering http/1.1
* Cipher selection: ALL:!EXPORT:!EXPORT40:!EXPORT56:!aNULL:!LOW:!RC4:@STRENGTH
* successfully set certificate verify locations:
*   CAfile: /etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt
  CApath: none
* TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS handshake, Client hello (1):
* TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS handshake, Server hello (2):
* TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS handshake, Certificate (11):
* TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS handshake, Server key exchange (12):
* TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS handshake, Server finished (14):
* TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS handshake, Client key exchange (16):
* TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS change cipher, Client hello (1):
* TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS handshake, Finished (20):
* TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS handshake, Finished (20):
* SSL connection using TLSv1.2 / ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384
* ALPN, server did not agree to a protocol
* Server certificate:
*  subject: C=US; ST=NJ; CN=lb.drjohnstechtalk.com
*  start date: Nov 14 12:06:02 2017 GMT
*  expire date: Nov 14 12:06:02 2018 GMT
*  SSL certificate verify result: unable to get local issuer certificate (20), continuing anyway.
&gt; GET / HTTP/1.1
&gt; Host: lb.drjohnstechtalk.com
&gt; User-Agent: curl/7.55.1
&gt; Accept: */*
&gt;
* OpenSSL SSL_read: SSL_ERROR_SYSCALL, errno 104
* Closing connection 0
curl: (56) OpenSSL SSL_read: SSL_ERROR_SYSCALL, errno 104

This also seems to occur as I’ve seen when there’s a load balancer in front of a web server where the load balancer is working fine but the web server is not.

Another example challenging web site
$ curl ‐‐version

curl 7.19.7 (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.19.7 NSS/3.27.1 zlib/1.2.3 libidn/1.18 libssh2/1.4.2
Protocols: tftp ftp telnet dict ldap ldaps http file https ftps scp sftp
Features: GSS-Negotiate IDN IPv6 Largefile NTLM SSL libz

$ curl ‐v ‐k https://e1st.smapply.org/

* About to connect() to e1st.smapply.org port 443 (#0)
*   Trying 72.55.140.155... connected
* Connected to e1st.smapply.org (72.55.140.155) port 443 (#0)
* Initializing NSS with certpath: sql:/etc/pki/nssdb
* warning: ignoring value of ssl.verifyhost
* NSS error -12286
* Closing connection #0
* SSL connect error
curl: (35) SSL connect error

I have seen this suggestion on the Internet to fix the system-supplied curl on a CentOS 6.8 system:

yum update -y nss curl libcurl

It didn’t work!

Rationale
I tried to give the owners of e1st.smapply.org a hard time for supporting such a limited set of ciphersuites – essentially only the latest thing (which you can see yourself by running it through sslabs.com): TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384. If I run this through SSL interception on a Symantec proxy with an older image, that ciphersuite isn’t present! I had to upgrade, then it was fine. But getting back to the rationale, they told me they have future-proofed their site for the new requirements of PCI and they would not budge.

Another curl error

curl: (3) Illegal characters found in URL

If your url looks visibly OK, mkae sure you don’t have and non-printed characters in it. Put it through the linux od -c utility. In my case I culled the url from a Location header after parsing it with awk. Unbeknownst to me, tagging along at the end, unseen, was an extra \n\r characters. I had to get rid of those.

Conclusion
A TLS version error is explained, as well as the way it came about. Another curl/SSL error is also explained.

References and related
I eventually came up with the solution: compile my own updated version of curl! I describe how I did it in this blog post.

A more recent TLS versioning problem which I could have only resolved by using curl is described in this post.

Categories
Network Technologies Web Site Technologies

SSL Interception: troubleshooting

Intro
SSl Interception is a reality at some larger companies. From a security perspective it is vital as it permits you to extend your AV scanning, botnet detection, 0-day, DLP, cloud security, etc to your https traffic which is normally just an encrypted blur to the edge devices through which the traffic flows.

Bluecoat has a good solution for SSL interception, but it is possible to make some mistakes. Here I document one of those and provide a few other tips.

The details
The general idea is that within your large company – let’s call it “B” – there is an existing PKI infrastructure which is in use. In particular a private root CA has been included in the certificate store on B’s standard PC image. B users use explicit proxy. This is a requirement for SSL interception by the way. Now B’s PKI team issues an intermediate certificate to B’s proxy server such that it can sign certificates. That’s a so-called signing certificate because in the extensions it explicitly mentions:

            X509v3 Basic Constraints: critical
                CA:TRUE, pathlen:0
            X509v3 Key Usage: critical
                Certificate Sign, CRL Sign

B’s proxy, when asked to access an external https site by a desktop PC, then acts as an SSL client, decrypts the traffic, does all its AV, 0-day, DLP inspections, then re-encrypts it with its own on-the-fly issued certificate before sending it along to the desktop! In the PKI world, a signing certificate is a big deal because in the wrong hands havoc could result.

For instance, user requests https://www.google.com/. What user gets is https://www.google.com, but when user inspects the certificate, he sees the a www.google.com certificate issued by the proxy, which was issued from B’s own root CA (screenshot further down below).

Results if implemented badly
You might see this in Internet Explorer for every https site you access:

The security certificate presented by this website was not issued by a trusted certificate authority.

Security certificate problems may indicate an attempt to fool you or intercept any data you send to the server.

Looking at the certificate in Chrome (the only way I know how) shows the problem:

Certificate Error
There are issues with the site’s certificate chain (net::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID).

And indeed in examining the certificate it appears stand-alone. The whole chain should normally be displayed there but there is only the end certificate. So browsers won’t trust it.

What is happening in this case is that the proxy is intercepting, but its not providing the intermediate CERT.

Here is a screen shot showing that the proxy is the issuer for the certificate:

What to check
In our experience this can happen if the proxy’s signer certificate is present in a keyring on the proxy, but not present in the CA Certificates. We added this CERT to the CA Certificates and it behaved much better. Here’s a view of the CA Certificates after fixing it:

And a view of the certificate chain:


2022 Update

So the guy who normally does this retired and it fell onto my shoulders – getting the new signing certificates installed. I’ll be danged if I didn’t run into the exact same problem and waste an entire afternoon on it. Until. I discovered my own blog post from five years ago! And it still works! And it’s the only place where this specific problem is discussed and a solution presented. Kudos: me! Now Bluecoat -> Broadcom, but it’s the exact same stuff under the hood.

Other tips
We got no results whatsoever when we initiated an SSL layer until we turned on Detect Protocol:

On the other hand we had a site break just from enabling Detect Protocol. Even when SSLInterception was set to action: Disabled.

We found that action: None worked better for these cases. That sets the behaviour back to what you had before you enabled Detect Protocol. The idea being that Detect Protocol invokes the SSL Proxy component of Bluecoat. The SSL Proxy can mess things up a bit for some SSL sites. Our problem was with a Java SSL site.

What about pinned certificates
Certificate Pinning provides the browser an independent way to verify who was supposed to have issued the site’s certificate. This would seem to be a doomsday scenario for SSL interception, but most browsers have built in an exception so that if the browser is on the local network it will ignore the pin.


Great resource for anyone doing SSL interception

There are many scenarios to consider when you have a Man In The Middle. OWS is Origin Web Server in the following. How will it behave if:

  • the OWS CERT is expired
  • the OWS CERT is self-signed
  • the OWS CERT is revoked
  • the OWS only offers weak ciphers
  • the OWS CERT is from a CA not trusted by the browser
  • the OWS CERT contains the wrong common name
  • the OWS CERT lacks the intermediate CERT
  • the OWS CERT is pinned
  • etc.

Get the idea? Lots of things to consider here – the scenarios, how your SSL intercepting device actually behaves, and how you want your SSL interception to behave for that scenario.

A great resource where they’re done the job for you to build certificates with almost every defect you can think of, is badssl.com.

Regrets
Man I wish openssl supported usage through proxy, in particular openssl s_client. But it doesn’t. Examining certificates with the various browsers is a pain, and I don’t fully trust them. For me openssl is truth.


References and related

All different kinds of faulty certificate scenarios to test with: badssl.com

You can now get “real” certificate for free! I’ve used them myself several times: Lets Encrypt

My article concerning Lets Encrypt usage: Saving money using Lets Encrypt

An article I wrote explaining ciphers.

Some openssl commands I’ve found useful: My favorite openssl commands.

Somehow related to all this is a web site that guarantees to never use SSL, which can be useful when you are using a guest WiFi requiring sign-on and want to hit a “safe” site (a non-SSL site can be hard to find these days): http://neverssl.com/

Categories
Admin Apache CentOS Security

drjohnstechtalk.com is now an encrypted web site

Intro
I don’t overtly chase search engine rankings. I’m comfortable being the 2,000,000th most visited site on the Internet, or something like that according to alexa. But I still take pride in what I’m producing here. So when I read a couple weeks ago that Google would be boosting the search rank of sites which use encryption, I felt I had to act. For me it is equally a matter of showing that I know how to do it and a chance to write another blog posting which may help others.

Very, very few people have my situation, which is a self-hosted web site, but still there may be snippets of advice which may apply to other situations.

I pulled off the switch to using https instead of http last night. The detail of how I did it are below.

The details
Actually there was nothing earth-shattering. It was a simple matter of applying stuff i already know how to do and putting it all together. of course I made some glitches along the way, but I also resolved them.

First the CERT
I was already running an SSL web server virtual server at https://drjohnstechtalk.com/ , but it was using a self-signed certificate. Being knowledgeable about certificates, I knew the first and easiest thing to do was to get a certificate (cert) issued by a recognized certificate authority (CA). Since my domain was bought from GoDaddy I decided to get my SSL certificate form them as well. It’s $69.99 for a one-year cert. Strangely, there is no economy of scale so a two-year cert costs exactly twice as much. i normally am a strong believer in two-year certs simply to avoid the hassle of renewing, etc, but since I am out-of-practice and feared I could throw my money away if I messed up the cert, I went with a one-year cert this time. It turns out I had nothing to fear…

Paying for a certificate at GoDaddy is easy. Actually figuring out how to get your certificate issued by them? Not so much. But I figured out where to go on their web site and managed to do it.

Before the CERT, the CSR
Let’s back up. Remember I’m self-hosted? I love being the boss and having that Linux prompt on my CentOS VM. So before I could buy a legit cert I needed to generate a private key and certificate signing request (CSR), which I did using openssl, having no other fancy tools available and being a command line lover.

To generate the private key and CSR with one openssl command do this:

$ openssl req -new -nodes -out myreq.csr

It prompts you for field values, e.g.:

Here’s how that dialog went:

Generating a 2048 bit RSA private key
.............+++
..............................+++
writing new private key to 'privkey.pem'
-----
You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated
into your certificate request.
What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN.
There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank
For some fields there will be a default value,
If you enter '.', the field will be left blank.
-----
Country Name (2 letter code) [XX]:US
State or Province Name (full name) []:New Jersey
Locality Name (eg, city) [Default City]:
Organization Name (eg, company) [Default Company Ltd]:drjohnstechtalk.com
Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:
Common Name (eg, your name or your server's hostname) []:drjohnstechtalk.com
Email Address []:
 
Please enter the following 'extra' attributes
to be sent with your certificate request
A challenge password []:
An optional company name []:

and the files it created:

$ ls -ltr|tail -2

-rw-rw-r-- 1 john john     1704 Aug 23 09:52 privkey.pem
-rw-rw-r-- 1 john john     1021 Aug 23 09:52 myreq.csr

Before shipping it off to a CA you really ought to examine the CSR for accuracy. Here’s how:

$ openssl req -text -in myreq.csr

Certificate Request:
    Data:
        Version: 0 (0x0)
        Subject: C=US, ST=New Jersey, L=Default City, O=drjohnstechtalk.com, CN=drjohnstechtalk.com
        Subject Public Key Info:
            Public Key Algorithm: rsaEncryption
                Public-Key: (2048 bit)
                Modulus:
                    00:e9:04:ab:7e:e1:c1:87:44:fb:fe:09:e1:8d:e5:
                    29:1c:cb:b5:e8:d0:cc:f4:89:67:23:ab:e5:e7:a6:
                    ...

What are we looking for, anyways? Well, the modulus should be the same as it is for the private key. To list the modulus of your private key:

$ openssl rsa -text -in privkey.pem|more

The other things I am looking for is the common name (CN) which has to exactly match the DNS name that is used to access the secure site.

I’m not pleased about the Default City, but I didn’t want to provide my actual city. We’ll see it doesn’t matter in the end.

For some CAs the Organization field also matters a great deal. Since I am a private individual I decided to use the CN as my organization and that was accepted by GoDaddy. So Probably its value also doesn’t matter.

the other critical thing is the length of the public key, 2048 bits. These days all keys should be 2048 bits. some years ago 1024 bits was perfectly fine. I’m not sure but maybe older openssl releases would have created a 1024 bit key length so that’s why you’ll want to watch out for that.

Examine the CERT
GoDaddy issued the certificate with some random alpha-numeric filename. i renamed it to something more suitable, drjohnstechtalk.crt. Let’s examine it:

$ openssl x509 -text -in drjohnstechtalk.crt|more

Certificate:
    Data:
        Version: 3 (0x2)
        Serial Number:
            27:ab:99:79:cb:55:9f
        Signature Algorithm: sha256WithRSAEncryption
        Issuer: C=US, ST=Arizona, L=Scottsdale, O=GoDaddy.com, Inc., OU=http://certs.godaddy.com/repository/, CN=Go Daddy Secure Certificate Authority - G2
        Validity
            Not Before: Aug 21 00:34:01 2014 GMT
            Not After : Aug 21 00:34:01 2015 GMT
        Subject: OU=Domain Control Validated, CN=drjohnstechtalk.com
        Subject Public Key Info:
            Public Key Algorithm: rsaEncryption
                Public-Key: (2048 bit)
                Modulus:
                    00:e9:04:ab:7e:e1:c1:87:44:fb:fe:09:e1:8d:e5:
                    29:1c:cb:b5:e8:d0:cc:f4:89:67:23:ab:e5:e7:a6:
                     ...

So we’re checking that common name, key length, and what if any organization they used (in the Subject field). Also the modulus should match up. Note that they “cheaped out” and did not provide www.drjohnstechtalk.com as an explicit alternate name! In my opinion this should mean that if someone enters the URL https://www.drjohnstechtalk.com/ they should get a certificate name mismatch error. In practice this does not seem to happen – I’m not sure why. Probably the browsers are somewhat forgiving.

The apache side of the house
I don’t know if this is going to make any sense, but here goes. To begin I have a bare-bones secure virtual server that did essentially nothing. So I modified it to be an apache redirect factory and to use my brand shiny new legit certificate. Once I had that working I planned to swap roles and filenames with my regular configuration file, drjohns.conf.

Objective: don’t break existing links
Why the need for a redirect factory? This I felt as a matter of pride is important: it will permit all the current links to my site, which are all http, not https, to continue to work! That’s a good thing, right? Now most of those links are in search engines, which constantly comb my pages, so I’m sure over time they would automatically be updated if I didn’t bother, but I just felt better about knowing that no links would be broken by switching to https. And it shows I know what I’m doing!

The secure server configuration file on my server is in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/drjohns.secure.conf. It’s an apache v 2.2 server. I put all the relevant key/cert/intermediate cert files in /etc/apache2/certs. the private key’s permissions were set to 600. The relevant apache configuration directives are here to use this CERT along with the GoDaddy intermediate certificates:

 
   SSLEngine on
    SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/certs/drjohnstechtalk.crt
    SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/apache2/certs/drjohnstechtalk.key
    SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/apache2/certs/gd_bundle-g2-g1.crt

I initially didn’t include the intermediate certs (chain file), which again in my experience should have caused issues. Once again I didn’t observe any issues from omitting it, but my experience says that it should be present.

The redirect factory setup
For the redirect testing I referred to my own blog posting (which I think is underappreciated for whatever reason!) and have these lines:

# I really don't think this does anything other than chase away a scary warning in the error log...
        RewriteLock ${APACHE_LOCK_DIR}/rewrite_lock
<VirtualHost *:80>
 
        ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
        ServerName      www.drjohnstechtalk.com
        ServerAlias     drjohnstechtalk.com
        ServerAlias     johnstechtalk.com
        ServerAlias     www.johnstechtalk.com
        ServerAlias     vmanswer.com
        ServerAlias     www.vmanswer.com
# Inspired by the dreadful documentation on http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html
        RewriteEngine on
        RewriteMap  redirectMap prg:redirect.pl
        RewriteCond ${redirectMap:%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}} ^(.+)$
# %N are backreferences to RewriteCond matches, and $N are backreferences to RewriteRule matches
        RewriteRule ^/.* %1 [R=301,L]

Pages look funny after the switch to SSL
One of the first casualties after the switch to SSL was that my pages looked funny. I know from general experience that this can happen if there is hard-wired links to http URLs, and that is what I observed in the page source. In particular my WP-Syntax plugin was now bleeding verbatim entries into the columns to the right if the PRE text contained long lines. Not pretty. The page source mostly had https includes, but in one place it did not. It had:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://drjohnstechtalk.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/wp-syntax/wp-syntax.css"

I puzzled over where that originated and I had a few ideas which didn’t turn out so well. For instance you’d think inserting this into wp-config.php would have worked:

define( 'WP_CONTENT_URL','https://drjohnstechtalk.com/blog/wp-content/');

But it had absolutely no effect. Finally I did an RTFM – the M being http://codex.wordpress.org/Editing_wp-config.php which is mentioned in wp-config.hp – and learned that the siteurl is set in the administration settings in the GUI, Settings|General WordPress Address URL and Site Address URL. I changed these to https://drjohnstechtalk.com/blog and bingo, my plugins began to work properly again!

What might go wrong when turning on SSL
In another context I have seen both those errors, which I feel are poorly documented on the Internet, so I wish to mention them here since they are closely related to the topic of this blog post.

SSL routines:SSL23_GET_SERVER_HELLO:unknown protocol:s23_clnt.c:601

and

curl: (35) error:140770FC:SSL routines:SSL23_GET_SERVER_HELLO:unknown protocol

I generated the first error in the process of trying to look at the SSL web site using openssl. What I do to test that certificates are being properly presented is:

$ openssl s_client -showcerts -connect localhost:443

And the second error mentioned above I generated trying to use curl to do something similar:

$ curl -i -k https://localhost/

The solution? Well, I began to suspect that I wasn’t running SSL at all so I tested curl assuming I was running on tcp port 443 but regular http:

$ curl -i http://localhost:443/

Yup. That worked just fine, producing all the usual HTTP response headers plus the content of my home page. So that means I wasn’t running SSL at all.

This virtual host being from a template I inherited and one I didn’t fully understand, I decided to just junk the most suspicious parts of the vhost configuration, which in my case were:

<IfDefine SSL>
<IfDefine !NOSSL>
...
</IfDefine>
</IfDefine>

and comment those guys out, giving,

#<IfDefine SSL>
#<IfDefine !NOSSL>
...
#</IfDefine>
#</IfDefine>

That worked! After a restart I really was running SSL.

Making it stronger
I did not do this immediately, but after the POODLE vulnerability came out and I ran some tests I realized I should have explicitly chosen a cipher suite in my apache server to make the encryption sufficiently unbreakable. This section of my working with ciphers post shows some good settings.

Mixed content
I forgot about something in my delight at running my own SSL web server – not all content was coming to the browser as https and Firefox and Internet Explorer began to complain as they grew more security-conscious over the months. After some investigation I found that what it was is that I had a redirect for favicon.ico to the WordPress favicon.ico. But it was a redirect to their HTTP favicon.ico. I changed it to their secure version, https://s2.wp.com/i/favicon.ico, and all was good!

I never use the Firefox debugging tools so I got lucky. I took a guess to find out more about this mixed content and clicked on Tools|Web developer|Web console. My lucky break was that it immediately told me the element that was still HTTP amidst my HTTPS web page. Knowing that it was a cinch to fix it as mentioned above.

Conclusion
Good-ole search engine optimization (SEO) has prodded us to make the leap to run SSL. In this posting we showed how we did that while preserving all the links that may be floating ou there on the Internet by using our redirect factory.

References
Having an apache instance dedicated to redirects is described in this article.
Some common sense steps to protect your apache server are described here.
Some other openssl commands besides the ones used here are described here.
Choosing an appropriate cipher suite and preventing use of the vulnerable SSLv2/3 is described in this post.
I read about Google’s plans to encrypt the web in this Naked Security article.

Categories
Admin

The IT Detective Agency: strange ssl error explained

Intro
Fromm time-to-time I get an unusual ssl error when using curl to check one of my web sites. This post documents the error and how I recovered from it.

The details

I was bringing up a new web site on the F5 BigIP loadbalancer. It was a secure site. I typically use the F5 as an ssl acclerator so it terminates the ssl connection and makes an http connection back to the origin server.

So I tested my new site with curl:

$ curl -i -k https://secure.drj.com/

curl: (52) SSL read: error:00000000:lib(0):func(0):reason(0), errno 104

Weird, I thought. I had taken the certificate from an older F5 unit and maybe I had installed it or its private key wrong?

I tested with openssl:

$ openssl s_client -showcerts -connect secure.drj.com:443

...
SSL handshake has read 2831 bytes and written 453 bytes
---
New, TLSv1/SSLv3, Cipher is RC4-SHA
Server public key is 2048 bit
Secure Renegotiation IS NOT supported
Compression: NONE
Expansion: NONE
SSL-Session:
    Protocol  : TLSv1
    Cipher    : RC4-SHA
    Session-ID: E95AB5EA2D896D5B3A8BC82F1962FA4A68669EBEF1699DF375EEE95410EF5A0C
    Session-ID-ctx:
    Master-Key: EC5CA816BBE0955C4BC24EE198FE209BB0702FDAB4308A9DD99C1AF399A69AA19455838B02E78500040FE62A7FC417CD
    Key-Arg   : None
    Start Time: 1374679965
    Timeout   : 300 (sec)
    Verify return code: 20 (unable to get local issuer certificate)
---

This all looks pretty normal – the same as what you get from a healthy working site. So the SSL, contrary to what I was seeing from curl, seemed to be working OK.

OK, so, SSL is handled by the F5 itself we were saying. That leaves the origin server. Bingo!

In F5 you have virtual servers and pools. You configure the SSL CERTs and the public-facing IP and the pool on the virtual server. The pool is where you configure your origin server(s).

I had forgotten to associate a default pool with my virtual server! So the F5 had nowhere to go really with the request after handling the initial SSL dialog.

I don’t think the available help for this error is very good so I wanted to offer this specific example.

So I associated a pool with my virtual server and immediately the problem went away.

Case closed.

Conclusion
We solved a very specific case this week and hopefully provided some guidance to others who might be seeing this issue.

References
My favorite openssl commands