webpki VS mkcert

Beyond that, various things like the ScyllaDB driver are using OpenSSL because WebPKI doesn't support validating connections to IP addresses (as opposed to DNS names) and RusTLS currently delegates to WebPKI.

There's a JIT framework in Rust: https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime

There's a library for doing full X.509 certificate parsing and verification: https://briansmith.org/rustdoc/webpki/

There's definitely some attempts at doing pure-Rust SSL, but I suspect a lot of them are also doing some sketchy things with crypto that shouldn't be trusted (getting constant-time stuff implemented properly is really challenging, and probably requires large amounts of assembly to guarantee correctness).

An issue was raised with webpki to support the IP addressees 5 years ago, and yet it's still not there. What do people use to overcome the fact that rustls can't do IP-based client connections because of it? My guess would be, they are switching to native-tls or openssl-tls.

Yes, rustls currently doesn't support certificates without hostnames (only an IP); this is actually an issue with the webpki crate, and work to solve it is ongoing (will hopefully land in a release in a few months or so).

> Bundling this set with Firefox

I love that they did that; it was actually my idea (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=657228). I believe the list is pretty large and changes frequently and so they download it dynamically.

> short cut to a "Yes"

Do they really do that? That's awesome if so. Then they don't even need to ship the roots.

> I specifically don't like [...] saying "unknown issuer"

https://github.com/briansmith/webpki/issues/221

> If std::fs::File::open() gives me Result with an io:Error that claims "File not found" but the underlying OS file open actually failed due to a permission error, you can see why that's a problem right? Even if this hypothetical OS doesn't expose any specific errors, "File not found" is misleading.

A more accurate analogy: You ask to open "example.txt" without supplying the path, and there is no "example.txt" in the current working directory. You will get "file not found."

Regardless, I agree we could have a better name than UnknownIssuer for this error.

The author mentions difficulties with HTTPS and trying stuff locally.

I've had some success with mkcert [1] to easily create certificates trusted by browsers, I can suggest to look into this. You are your own root CA, I think it can work without an internet connection.

[1] https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert/

Solution: mkcert – Your Zero-Configuration HTTPS Enabler Meet mkcert, a user-friendly, zero-configuration tool designed for creating locally-trusted development certificates. Find it on its GitHub page and follow the instructions tailored for your operating system. For Mac users employing Homebrew, simply execute the following commands in your terminal:

Well, Certifi does not ship with your company's certificates! So requesting internal services may come with additional painful extra steps! Also for a local development environment that uses mkcert for example!

My project, getlocalcert.net[1] may be the one you're thinking of.

Since I'm also building in this space, I'll give my perspective. Local certificate generation is complicated. If you spend the time, you can figure it out, but it's begging for a simpler solution. You can use tools like mkcert[2] for anything that's local to your machine. However, if you're already using ACME in production, maybe you'd prefer to use ACME locally? I think that's what Anchor offers, a unified approach.

There's a couple references in the Anchor blog about solving the distribution problem by building better tooling[3]. I'm eager to learn more, that's a tough nut to crack. My theory for getlocalcert is that the distribution problem is too difficult (for me) to solve, so I layer the tool on top of Let's Encrypt certificates instead. The end result for both tools is a trusted TLS certificate issued via ACME automation.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36674224

2. https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert

3. https://blog.anchor.dev/the-acme-gap-introducing-anchor-part...

Looks like step-ca/step-cli [1] and mkcert [2] have been mentioned. Another related tool is XCA [3] - a gui tool to manage CAs and server/client TLS certificates. It takes off some of the tedium in using openssl cli directly. It also stores the certs and keys in an encrypted database. It doesn't solve the problem of getting the root CA certificate into the system store or of hosting the revocation list. I use XCA to create and store the root CA. Intermediate CAs signed with it are passed to other issuers like vault and step-issuer.

[1] https://smallstep.com/docs/step-ca/

[2] https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert

[3] https://hohnstaedt.de/xca/

We use mkcert for this, it works wonderfully.

https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert

mkcert: This is used to obtain a trusted TLS certificate with a custom domain name for your development machine. You can install mkcert on your development machine following the official instructions.

I've been pretty frustrated with how private CAs are supported. Your private root CA can be maliciously used to MITM every domain on the Internet, even though you intend to use it for only a couple domain names. Most people forget to set Name Constraints when they create these and many helper tools lack support [1][2]. Worse, browser support for Name Constraints has been slow [3] and support isn't well tracked [4]. Public CAs give you certificate transparency and you can subscribe to events to detect mis-issuance. Some hosted private CAs like AWS's offer logs [5], but DIY setups don't.

Even still, there are a lot of folks happily using private CAs, they aren't the target audience for this initial release.

[1] https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert/issues/302

[2] https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/issues/3655

[3] https://alexsci.com/blog/name-non-constraint/

[4] https://github.com/Netflix/bettertls/issues/19

[5] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/privateca/latest/userguide/secur...