Re: CA Certificates

On Thu, Apr 7, 2022 at 8:22 AM Jack Woehr via MIDRANGE-L <
midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Thu, Apr 7, 2022 at 7:12 AM Brad Stone <bvstone@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

You got it right, Greg. With most TCPIP using SSL/TLS you need to import
the CA(s) used by the server system so your IBM i "trusts" the

certificate

(to be more specific, it makes your system trust the issuers of the
certificate... ie.. the Certificate Authority).

To be more specific:

Your garden-variety website presents a certificate which points back to a
well-known Certificate Authority, usually through a chain.
That is, their cert is signed by A.COM whose cert is verified by B.COM
whose cert is verified by the top-level authority C.COM

No, they're signed by Authorities, not ".coms" That sort of obfuscates
things more.

The reason us IBM i folks spend so much time installing certs via DCIM is
that our in-house certs and those of our EDI partners are often
*self-signed*, hence, *invalid* on the face of things.

Having dealt with thousands of customers on this, I can say this isn't true
either. It's just that IBM doesn't pre-load every CA out there.

Helping customers import CAs I've probably done 1 self-signed to 1000 well
known CAs. Most were from well known sites like Google and Microsoft and
GoDaddy.

I put together docs to help them import CAs (and extract them from a
website or using openSSL), but that didn't help most (over their head). So
then when I found out I could bypass the "trust" I added that in and my
life has 50% more free time. :)

Brad
www.bvstools.com