Untangling the certificate error messages - DevConf.CZ 2020
Channel: DevConf
Date: 30/03/2020

Speakers: Martin Ukrop, Pavol Žáčik

Have you ever seen a TLS certificate error? I bet you have – be it in a browser, CLI or a graphical pop-up window. These error messages tend to be cryptic, as all sorts of things can go wrong in TLS. And the official documentation is… not necessarily helping you understand them. Furthermore, multiple TLS libraries have different sets of errors. But developer experience matters – if your developers get the security wrong, all the end users may suffer the consequences.
We are attempting to make X.509 errors usable. We want to simplify the ecosystem by consolidating the errors and their documentation (a similar thing happened to web documentation recently). We map and compare errors from the most used libraries, (better) explain what the validation errors mean and provide ready-to-use sample certificates for testing. The current state of the project can be found at https://x509errors.org.
The presented research is a part of the academic cooperation of Red Hat Czech and Masaryk University.

[ https://sched.co/YOr8 ]

--
Recordings of talks at DevConf are a community effort. Unfortunately not everything works perfectly every time. If you're interested in helping us improve, let us know.