Certificates, Encryption, And Authentication

Question

Mostly, my confusion seems to be eminating from my attempts to understand security within the context of WCF. In WCF, it looks like certificates can be used for the purpose of authentication, as well as encryption. Basically, I am trying to understand:

1. How can an X509 certificate be used as an authentication token? Aren't ssl certificates usually made to be publically available? Wouldn't this make it impossible for them to be used for authentication purposes? If not, are there some protocols which are commonly used for this purpose?
2. When encrypting messages with WCF, are certificates used which have been issued only to the client, only to the server, or to both? If certificates from the client and server are both used, I'm a little unclear as to why. This mostly stems from my understanding of https, in which case only a certificate issued to the server (and chained to some certificate issued by a root CA) would be necessary to establish an encrypted connection and authenticate the server.

I'm not entirely sure this is the correct forum. My questions stemmed from trying to understand WCF, but I guess I would like to understand the theory behind this in general. If it's a good idea, please suggest the correct forum for me. I'd be happy to try to get this question migrated, if necessary.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

The certificate only has the public key of a public/private key pair. It does not have the private key -- this is separate from the certificate proper. When you connect to an HTTPS server, you can trust that the server is the owner of that certificate because the server must be holding the private key (and hopefully nobody else has it) because otherwise the SSL connection is not possible. If the server did not hold the private key that pairs with the public key of its certificate, it could not present you with a valid SSL connection.

You then can decide whether or not you trust that particular certificate based on one or more certificate authorities (CA) that have signed the chain of certificates. For example, there may be just one CA that has signed this certificate. You have a trusted CA root certificate locally, and so you know that it in fact was your trusted CA that signed that server certificate, because that signature would not be possible unless that CA held the private key to the CA certificate. Once again it is merely holding the private key, in this case that proves who signed the certificate. This is how you can trust the certificate.

When you present the optional client certificate on the SSL connection, the server can trust you because 1) it can see the CA (or CA's) that sign your client certificate, and 2) it can tell that you have your private key in your possession because otherwise the SSL connection would not be possible. So it also works in reverse for the server trusting the client.

You can tell that everybody is honest if you trust that the server and client are keeping their private keys private, and if you trust the source of your root certificates that sign the server and client certificates (or chains of certificates.)

Answer 2

Well this is pretty complex question. I will try to explain some parts but avoiding as much detail as possible (even after that it will be pretty long).

How does authentication with certificate work?

If a holder of the private key signs some data, other participants can use the public key of the signer to validate the signature. This mechanism can be used for authentication. Private and public keys are stored in certificate where private key is kept safe on the holder machine whereas certificate with public key can be publicly available.

How does it relate to HTTPS?

WCF offers transport and message security. The difference between them is described here. The transport security in case of HTTP is HTTPS where only server needs issued certificate and client must to trust this certificate. This certificate is used both for authenticating server to the client and for establishing secure channel (which uses symmetric encryption).

HTTPS also offers variant called Mutual HTTPS where client must have also issued certificate and client uses the certificate to authenticate to the server.

How does message security work and what is a purpose of two certificates in that scenario?

In case of message security each message is signed, encrypted and authenticated separately = all these security informations are part of the message. In case of SOAP this is described by many specifications but generally you are interested in security bindings and X.509 Token profile.

Security binding is part of WS-SecurityPolicy assertions and it is describes how the message is secured. We have three bindings:

• Symmetric security binding - symmetric encryption
• Asymmetric security binding - asymmetric encryption
• Transport security binding - assertion that message must be send over HTTPS or other secured transport

X.509 Token profile specifies how to transport certificates (public keys) in messages and how to use them.

Now if you have symmetric security binding you need only server certificate because

• When client wants to send message to the server it will first generate random key.
• It will use this key to encrypt and sign request
• It will use service certificate to encrypt derived key and pass it to the request as well.
• When the server receives the message it will first use its private key to decrypt that key.
• It will use decrypted key to decrypt the rest of the message.
• It will also use the key to encrypt the response because client knows that key.
• Client will use the same key generated for request to decrypt the response

This is symmetric encryption which is much more faster then asymmetric encryption but key derivation should not be available in WS-Security 1.0. It is available in WS-Security 1.1. HTTPS internally works in similar way but the key is the same for the whole connection lifetime.

If you have asymmetric security binding you need two certificates:

• Initiator must have its own certificate used to sign requests and decrypt responses
• Recipient must have its own certificate used to decrypt requests and sign responses

That means following algorithm

• Initiator encrypts request with recipient's public key
• Initiator signs request with its private key
• Recipient uses initiator's public key to validate request signature
• Recipient uses its private key to decrypt request
• Recipient uses initiator's public key to encrypt response
• Recipient uses its private key to sign response
• Initiator uses recipient's public key to validate response signature
• Initiator uses its private key to decrypt response

The order of signing and encrypting can be changed - there is another WS-SecurityPolicy assertion which says what should be done first.

These were basics. It can be much more complex because message security actually allow you as many certificates as you want - you can for example use endorsing token to sign primary signature with another certificate etc.