Relying on openssl's certificate authority list or provide my own

Question

My apologies if this is too subjective, but I am looking for advice on best practices. We maintain a small program written in Python that runs on our customers' servers and communicates back with our servers. We are using Python's ssl module which relies on openssl to protect this communication back to our servers. This program is run on older Linux systems (think RHEL5) as well as Windows variants. (Yes, the ssl module doesn't come by default with Python 2.4, but please ignore that issue for the sake of this question.)

Our plan is to include a file with the program containing the certificate authority that issued our current SSL certificate, as well as some other authorities that we may use in the future. That way, we know that no matter what is on the customer's servers, our certificate authority will be trusted.

Is this reasonable, or does openssl provide a good enough list of certificate authorities even for old openssl versions that we should not need to worry about this ourselves? Are there any issues we should also consider with regards to providing our own certificate authority list, beyond just locking us into that list for future SSL certs?

Answer 1

OpenSSL does not come with a list of trusted certificate agencies, it only has a default path where it looks for these CA. On Linux and *BSD this path is usually populated by the OS, often based on the list Mozilla uses in the Firefox browser.

But, there is no such list on Windows, because OpenSSL can not deal with they way windows stores the certificates. There is also no such list on OS X, but Apple added a hack to OpenSSL as shipped on Mac OS X to somehow integrate into their native key chain.

This means, if you want to have a controlled behavior you better ship with your own list of trusted CA. And if the program should only connect back only to your server it might be the best to include only the CAs relevant for this task.

Answer 2

Usually you can say that maintaining the OS' CA list is the responsibility of the admins of the client servers. Even if it weren't for your application, they should maintain that list, as long as there are applications that rely on it. If you have special requirements for the security of the https connection, you could run your own CA, and create a special subdomain on your server to serve a cert signed by your own CA.

Every additional CA on the list is one security risk more. Especially when the list is badly maintained, events like the problem with the indian CA go unnoticed.

However, always leave an option to add custom certificates on the client side, as some companies have proxies which intercept outgoing https traffic, decrypting, and then re-encrypting it. A custom CA might be a problem for those proxies, so when you create your CA, make it sure it only covers your domain, so that you can convince your customers to add your CA to the proxie's trusted CAs.