Sent: Sat Jun 16 2012 03:31:40 GMT-0400 (EDT) From: Bernd May <bernd@net.t-labs.tu-berlin.de>To: Patrick Hemmer <openldap@stormcloud9.net> openldap-technical@openldap.org Subject: Re: TLS issues when setting olcTLSCACertificateFile to the CA bundle
So you problem is, that you have signed your server cert with a CA from a CA chain and your clients with another CA and you don't want clients to connect, not signed by your client CA? This sounds more like a case for ACLs and matching rules, since you AFAIK you cannot tell ldap to only trust a CA for server cert verification purposes. A CA is trusted or not.
The assessment is correct, but I beg to differ on the statement "A CA is trusted or not".
Server certs are used by the client to verify the remote server is who it says it is. Client certs are used by the server to verify the client is allowed to talk to it. There is a very big difference between the two. The server doesnt care one bit if the CN of a client cert doesnt match the reverse DNS lookup of the IP the connection came from. All it cares is that the cert presented by the client is signed by a recognized CA. As such if you dont restrict the CAs that OpenLDAP will recognize for client certificates, any john-doe server with a certificate could connect (at which point client certs become useless).
-Patrick