Re: nss -- xmlSecNssX509StoreVerify question

Aleksey Sanin <[email protected]> Fri, 9 Dec 2016 09:19:07 -0800
Newsgroups	gmane.text.xml.xmlsec
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
Thanks for investigation. Obviously something is not right with
the tests. I want to investigate this further though not sure
if I will have time in the next couple weeks.

Aleksey

On 12/9/16 2:08 AM, Miklos Vajna wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Thu, Dec 08, 2016 at 02:53:37PM -0800, Aleksey Sanin <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Can you check the xmlSecDsigCtx to see if the key used for verification
>> (it is returned in the context) has a certificate attached to it?
> 
> I'm not sure how to check that. After xmlSecDSigCtxVerify() returns, I
> see this:
> 
> (gdb) print *pDsigCtx->signKey
> $12 = {name = 0x0, value = 0x1fb85d0, dataList = 0x200d780, usage = 4294967295, notValidBefore = 1450425499, notValidAfter = 1482825499}
> 
> How do I decide if it has a certificate or not?
> 
> In the meantime I tried to find out how the code path differs in case
> the root CA / interim CA certificates are / are not available in the NSS
> store.  (My understanding is that the intention of the
> XMLSEC_KEYINFO_FLAGS_X509DATA_DONT_VERIFY_CERTS flag is that in case
> it's set, then xmlSecDSigCtxVerify() shouldn't fail when CA certificates
> are not available, otherwise it should.)
> 
> Here is what I found: in xmlSecNssX509StoreVerify(), we call
> CERT_VerifyCertificate() from NSS. This function does actual
> verification only in case either a single certificate usage is
> specified, or a usage pointer is passed to it. In the later case the
> usage will contain the usages which could be validated.
> 
> This means that by changing xmlsec-nss' CERT_VerifyCertificate()
> invocation to pass in a usage pointer makes NSS actually attempt to
> validate something, which is all usages by default. When the CA
> certificates are not present, it still returns success, but in my case
> the usage bitfield is 0xb80 in the bad case (CA certs are missing) and
> 0xbb1 in the good case (CA certs are present). The values are OR'ed
> together from certificateUsage* defines from nss/lib/certdb/certt.h.
> 
> Based on this, I guess one approach would be to not only check the
> return vaulue of CERT_VerifyCertificate(), but also assert that the
> usage bitfield contains one of these usage defines, which are not always
> returned.
> 
> I've implemented this idea in the attached patch. I'm not exactly sure
> if this whitelist is a correct one, but it works for my test certificate
> at least, i.e. now xmlSecDSigCtxVerify() returns an error when the CA
> certs are not present.
> 
> This is all promising, except that lots of tests in 'make check' now
> fail, like this:
> 
> ----
> aleksey-xmldsig-01/enveloping-sha256-rsa-sha256-relationship
>     Checking required transforms                            OK
>     Checking required key data                              OK
>     Verify existing signature                             Fail
>     Create new signature                                    OK
>     Verify new signature                                  Fail
> ----
> 
> Now I'm not sure: is it possible that at least some of the tests depend
> on this misfeature that signature verification works even if the
> certificate can't be verified? Or did my patch break something? In the
> above case I verified that the returned usage bitfield is 0xb80, i.e. it
> returns exactly the usages which I intentionally did not consider in my
> patch. So either the test is not correct (bug I guess it is), or I don't
> have an idea right now how to detect the difference between the test and
> when my manual testing hits this "digest matches but the certificate
> can't be verified" case.
> 
> One more info: I've checked the mscrypto backend, and there
> xmlSecDSigCtxVerify() properly fails when the CA certs are missing, so I
> think the root cause is in the NSS backend (assuming NSS itself is not
> buggy, but that's probably the case).
> 
> Sorry for the long mail, I'm just dumping all the details, in case it
> helps. :-)
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Miklos
>

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