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I work with an application and the main site has a CA issued wildcard certificate for *.example.com.

We have several public facing subdomains eg app.example.com / cdn.example.com and several dev / qa environments eg. qa.example.com which are not available without being behind the corporate firewall.

Investigating a mixed content issue I was starting to talk to the network guys about trusted root certs and group policy for the dev boxes when I noticed that the main cert was a wildcard cert. Which leads me on to the question:

Are there any negative security implications by asking to have the public certificate imported onto the dev boxes?

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You are not just importing the public certificate. You are also importing the private key that belongs to it.

I think the main implication is that you will be giving an untold number of dev and qa people access to the production server's private key. That means with a quick file copy, they can go home and do man-in-the-middle or phishing attacks against your user base.

Apart from insider threat, since I assume your dev and qa environments have less security hardening than your prod environment, you are also lowering the bar for hackers to steal the prod server's private key . For example, a compromised dev machine (say from an email attachment) probably has an easier time accessing the qa system than the prod system.

Better to have your prod system and dev / qa systems using different private keys.

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  • Thanks for the answer...it was very informative. I was under the impression that the private key would also be secured by a password. I vaguely remember having to know a password to install some sort of cert in the past. I realised that it would be possible to obtain it, but thought it would be harder than just copying a file.
    – ste-fu
    Commented Nov 27, 2017 at 23:07
  • @ste-fu Do you need to type the password every time you reboot the server? If so, then your dev / qa people will know it, and also an attacker can plant a keylogger and wait for someone to type it after a reboot. If not, then in order for the server to unlock the key automatically, the password must be stored somewhere on the server, right? Presumably devs have root access to the dev / qa boxes? Think like a hacker!
    – Mike Ounsworth
    Commented Nov 27, 2017 at 23:29
  • Yeah...I think I'm getting confused with installing some other certificate or signing process. Insider threat is a big issue but one that takes a long time to fix. I hadn't considered the risk from compromising dev machines and moving onto the servers. Thanks for your help.
    – ste-fu
    Commented Nov 28, 2017 at 0:14

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