从命令行确定TLS / SSL证书是否“可信”？

Question

I would like to be able to determine if a remote domain's TLS/SSL certificate is 'trusted' from the command line.

Here is an openssl example I was playing with a few weeks back, here I use openssl to acquire the certificate and then pipe it to openssl's 'verify' command. I assumed that the 'verify' command would verify the certificate, however, how I understand it now is that the 'verify' command just verifies the certificate chain (I think). (cdn.pubnub.com is just a domain I found from a quick Twitter search as an example to use)

echo "GET /" | openssl s_client -connect cdn.pubnub.com:443 | openssl x509 -text | openssl verify

As you can see from the cdn.pubnub.com domain (at the time of writing), the browser (Chrome at least) does not trust the certificate (because the certificate domain doesn't match), however, the openssl 'verify' command does not output 'trusted' or 'not trusted' or something else we can deduct that information from.

Another way I thought of doing this, is by using a headless browser (such as PhantomJS ) and parsing any errors they return. It turns out that PhantomJS just errors but does not give any details, so this can not be used as the error could have been caused by something else.

I didn't think it would be this hard to find out that a certificate was trusted or not from the command line, without having to parse and check all the data that makes a certificate trusted myself which I don't think would be wise.

Is there a library or some other way I can tell if a remote domain's certificate is trusted from the command line?

Answer 1

curl (and libcurl ) uses OpenSSL for https URLs, and checks certificate validity unless -k, --insecure option is enabled.

zsh 29354 % curl https://cdn.pubnub.com/
curl: (51) SSL peer certificate or SSH remote key was not OK

As you see, it doesn't give much details on why the certificate is invalid, but otherwise it should be as good as a headless browser, and much lighter.

Answer 2

It depends on what you consider "trusted". Beside the core cryptographic checks (eg checking the digital signature) the client usually does the following:

1. Check that the certificate chains to a trusted root

2. Verify that the current time is between the notValidBefore and not validAfter attributes.

3. The certificate is not revoked.

4. keyUsage and other certificate constraints match.

5. The entity we are communicating is somehow found in the subject of the certificate (for servers this usually means the hostname is listed as CN or subjectAlternativeName).

In your case the information to verify step 5 (namely the hostname) is missing, so it cannot be checked. You would have to do this step yourself. Please note that different clients perform different checks to see if a certificate is trusted, so one answer may not apply to all possible clients. If you want to check your installation deeply, consider using the check from ssl labs https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest /