nanog mailing list archives

Re: Trivial change in Public Cert behaviour coming soon


From: John Levine via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org>
Date: 23 May 2025 22:38:42 -0400

It appears that Grant Taylor via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org> said:
Consider a web server that is serving up web pages to random people on 
the Internet completely unaffiliated / unassociated / unknown to the 
server;  e.g. to you and your family.  To be able to serve pages over 
HTTPS to them, a TLS certificate from a public CA that they trust MUST 
be used.

Now assume, for the sake of discussion, that you have multiple such 
servers and they want to use mTLS to authenticate their identities to 
each other.  --  Maybe it's for SMTP, or IKE, or VoIP, or....

As someone else noted, in this utterly implausible scenario (nobody
uses domain certificates to authorize mail submission, and SMTP
doesn't use client certs at all) you would have your private CA sign
the certs for your users.

You do know that you can have multiple signatures on the same cert, don't you?

R"s,
John
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