nut/docs/ssl.txt

Desc: Configuring SSL
File: ssl.txt
Date: 19 February 2004
Auth: Russell Kroll <rkroll@exploits.org>

SSL is now available as a development option.  It encrypts sessions with
upsd and can also be used to authenticate servers.  This means that
stealing port 3493 from upsd will no longer net you interesting
passwords.

Several things must happen before this will work, however:

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 1. Install OpenSSL.

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 2. Recompile NUT from source, starting with 'configure --with-ssl'.

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 3. Install everything as usual.

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 4. Create a certificate and key for upsd.  

    openssl (the program) should be in your PATH, unless you installed
    it from source yourself, in which case it may be in 
    /usr/local/ssl/bin.

	openssl req -new -x509 -nodes -out upsd.crt -keyout upsd.key

    You can also put a "-days nnn" in there to set the expiration.  If
    you skip this, it may default to 30 days.  This is probably not what
    you want.    

    It will ask several questions.  What you put in there doesn't matter
    a whole lot, since nobody is going to see it for now.  Future
    versions of the clients may present data from it, so you might use
    this opportunity to identify each server somehow.

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 5. Figure out the hash for the key.

	openssl x509 -hash -noout -in upsd.crt

    You'll get back a single line with 8 hex characters.  This is the
    hash of the certificate, which is used for naming the client-side
    certificate.  For the purposes of this example the hash is
    0123abcd.

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 6. Install the client-side certificate.

	mkdir <certpath>
	chmod 0755 <certpath>
	cp upsd.crt <certpath>/<hash>.0

    Example:

	mkdir /usr/local/ups/etc/certs
	chmod 0755 /usr/local/ups/etc/certs
	cp upsd.crt /usr/local/ups/etc/certs/0123abcd.0

    If you already have a file with that name in there, increment the
    0 until you get a unique filename that works.

    If you have multiple client systems (like upsmon slaves), be sure
    to install this file on them as well.

    I recommend making a directory under your existing confpath to
    keep everything in the same place.  Remember the path you created,
    since you will need to put it in upsmon.conf later.  

    It must not be writable by unprivileged users, since someone could
    insert a new client certificate and fool upsmon into trusting a
    fake upsd.

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 7. Create the combined file for upsd.

	cat upsd.crt upsd.key > upsd.pem

	chown root:nut upsd.pem
	chmod 0640 upsd.pem

    This file must be kept secure, since anyone possessing it could
    pretend to be upsd and harvest authentication data if they get a
    hold of port 3493.

    Having it be owned by root and readable by group nut allows upsd
    to read the file without being able to change the contents.  This
    is done to minimize the impact if someone should break into upsd.

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 8. Install the server-side certificate.

	mv upsd.pem <upsd certfile path>

    Example:

	mv upsd.pem /usr/local/ups/etc/upsd.pem

    After that, edit your upsd.conf and tell it where to find it:

	CERTFILE /usr/local/ups/etc/upsd.pem

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 9. Clean up the temporary files.

	rm -f upsd.crt upsd.key

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10. Restart upsd.

    It should come back up without any complaints.  If it says something
    about keys or certificates, then you probably missed a step.

    If you run upsd as a separate user id (like nutsrv), make sure that
    user can read the upsd.pem file.

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11. Point upsmon at the certificates.

    Edit your upsmon.conf, and tell it where the CERTPATH is:

	CERTPATH <path>

	CERTPATH /usr/local/ups/etc/certs

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12. Recommended: make upsmon verify all connections with certificates.

    Put this in upsmon.conf:

	CERTVERIFY 1

    Without this, there is no guarantee that the upsd is the right host.
    Enabling this greatly reduces the risk of man in the middle attacks.

    This effectively forces the use of SSL, so don't use this unless
    all of your upsd hosts are ready for SSL and have their certificates
    in order.

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13. Recommended: force upsmon to use SSL.

    Again in upsmon.conf:

	FORCESSL 1

    If you don't use CERTVERIFY 1, then this will at least make sure
    that nobody can sniff your sessions without a large effort.  Setting
    this will make upsmon drop connections if the remote upsd doesn't
    support SSL, so don't use it unless all of them have it running.

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14. Restart upsmon.

    You should see something like this in the syslog from upsd:

    foo upsd[1234]: Client mon@localhost logged in to UPS [myups] (SSL)

    If upsd or upsmon give any error messages, or the (SSL) is missing,
    then something isn't right.

    If in doubt about upsmon, start it with -D so it will stay in 
    the foreground and print debug messages.  It should print something
    like this every couple of seconds:

	polling ups: myups@localhost [SSL]

    Obviously, if the [SSL] isn't there, something's broken.

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15. Recommended: sniff the connection to see it for yourself.

    Using tcpdump, Ethereal, or another network sniffer tool, tell it
    to monitor port 3493/tcp and see what happens.  You should only see
    "STARTTLS" go out, "OK STARTTLS" come back, and the rest will be
    certificate data and then seemingly random characters.

    If you see any plaintext besides that (USERNAME, PASSWORD, etc.)
    then something is not working.

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SSL support should be considered stable but purposely underdocumented
since various bits of the implementation or configuration may change in
the future. In other words, if you use this and it stops working after
an upgrade, come back to this file to find out what changed.

This is why the other documentation doesn't mention any of these
directives yet.  SSL support is a treat for those of you that RTFM.

There are also potential licensing issues for people who ship binary
packages since NUT is GPL and OpenSSL is not compatible with it.  You
can still build and use it yourself, but you can't distribute the
results of it.  Or maybe you can.  It depends on what you consider
"essential system software", and some other legal junk that I'm not
going to touch.

Other packages have solved this by explicitly stating that an exception
has been granted.  That is (purposely) impossible here, since NUT is the
combined effort of many people, and all of them would have to agree to a
license change.  This is actually a feature, since it means nobody can
unilaterally run off with the source - not even me.

It would be nice if we could also link against gnutls to avoid the
licensing issues.

Potential problems
==================

If you specify a certificate expiration date, you will eventually 
see things like this in your syslog:

Oct 29 07:27:25 rktoy upsmon[3789]: Poll UPS [for750@rktoy] failed - 
SSL error: error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:
certificate verify failed

You can verify that it is expired by using openssl to display the date:

	openssl x509 -enddate -noout -in <certfile>

It'll display a date like this:

	notAfter=Oct 28 20:05:32 2002 GMT

If that's after the current date, you need to generate another cert/key
pair using the procedure above.

CAs / signed keys
=================

There are probably other ways to handle this, involving keys which have
been signed by a CA you recognize.  Contact your local SSL guru.