Re: [PATCH 1/2] tls: Drop support for tls_allowed_dn_list

On Tue, Nov 09, 2021 at 05:30:33PM +0100, Martin Kletzander wrote: > This setting was unsafe for a number of reasons, so bear with me here. > > In the Distinguished Name (or rather the string representation of ASN.1 > RelativeDistinguishedName if you will) the individial fields (or rather each > AttributeTypeAndValue) can be in any order as defined in RFC4514, section 2.2. > The function we use to get the DN is gnutls_x509_crt_get_dn(3) which claims to > return the DN as described in the aforementioned RFC. > > The help we are providing to the user when no DN from the list of allowed DNs > matches an incoming TLS connection says to check the output of certtool, > particularly `certtool -i --infile clientcert.pem`. However in the output of > that command the order of the fields changed in some previous version exposing > the inconsistency (see bugzilla link below for more details). > > This is one reason why we should not depend on the order of the fields being > stable as the same change can happen (and maybe already happened) with the > gnutls_x509_crt_get_dn(3) function. gnutls_x509_crt_get_dn() hasn't changed behaviour recently. Back in 2016 it was accidentally changed, but they quickly fixed that mistake, and introduced a newer gnutls_x509_crt_get_dn3() which is what certtool -i uses and reports in the opposite order. What changed recently is the order in which fields are written into the created certificate by certtool. This is fine, libvirt's tls_allowed_dn_list setting has to be configured to match the order of the fields in the certificates you're actually using. The primary bug here from libvirt's POV, is that we're incorrectly telling people to use the order reported by "certtool -i". We need to tell them to use the *reverse* of what certtool -i reports. Or we could possibly add a 'tls_allowed_dn_list_revere = bool' setting to make ordering configurable.

I put more details into the bug https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2018488#c3 showing tests to demonstrate the behaviour across gnutls versions. Regards, Daniel -- |: https://berrange.com -o- https://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange :| |: https://libvirt.org -o- https://fstop138.berrange.com :| |: https://entangle-photo.org -o- https://www.instagram.com/dberrange :|