OpenSSL: unable to verify the first certificate for Experian URL

I am trying to verify an SSL connection to Experian in Ubuntu 10.10 with OpenSSL client.

openssl s_client -CApath /etc/ssl/certs/ -connect dm1.experian.com:443

The problem is that the connection closes with a Verify return code: 21 (unable to verify the first certificate).

I've checked the certificate list, and the Certificate used to sign Experian (VeriSign Class 3 Secure Server CA - G3) is included in the list.

/etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt 

Yet I don't know why it is not able to verify the first certificate. Thanks in advance.

The entire response could be seen here: https://gist.github.com/1248790

Solution 1:

The first error message is telling you more about the problem:

verify error:num=20:unable to get local issuer certificate

The issuing certificate authority of the end entity server certificate is

VeriSign Class 3 Secure Server CA - G3

Look closely in your CA file - you will not find this certificate since it is an intermediary CA - what you found was a similar-named G3 Public Primary CA of VeriSign.

But why does the other connection succeed, but this one doesn't? The problem is a misconfiguration of the servers (see for yourself using the -debug option). The "good" server sends the entire certificate chain during the handshake, therefore providing you with the necessary intermediate certificates.

But the server that is failing sends you only the end entity certificate, and OpenSSL is not capable of downloading the missing intermediate certificate "on the fly" (which would be possible by interpreting the Authority Information Access extension). Therefore your attempt fails using s_client but it would succeed nevertheless if you browse to the same URL using e.g. FireFox (which does support the "certificate discovery" feature).

Your options to solve the problem are either fixing this on the server side by making the server send the entire chain, too, or by passing the missing intermediate certificate to OpenSSL as a client-side parameter.

Solution 2:

Adding additional information to emboss's answer.

To put it simply, there is an incorrect cert in your certificate chain.

For example, your certificate authority will have most likely given you 3 files.

• your_domain_name.crt
• DigiCertCA.crt # (Or whatever the name of your certificate authority is)
• TrustedRoot.crt

You most likely combined all of these files into one bundle.

-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- 
(Your Primary SSL certificate: your_domain_name.crt) 
-----END CERTIFICATE----- 
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- 
(Your Intermediate certificate: DigiCertCA.crt) 
-----END CERTIFICATE----- 
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- 
(Your Root certificate: TrustedRoot.crt) 
-----END CERTIFICATE-----

If you create the bundle, but use an old, or an incorrect version of your Intermediate Cert (DigiCertCA.crt in my example), you will get the exact symptoms you are describing.

• SSL connections appear to work from browser
• SSL connections fail from other clients
• Curl fails with error: "curl: (60) SSL certificate : unable to get local issuer certificate"
• openssl s_client -connect gives error "verify error:num=20:unable to get local issuer certificate"

Redownload all certs from your certificate authority and make a fresh bundle.

Solution 3:

I came across the same issue installing my signed certificate on an Amazon Elastic Load Balancer instance.

All seemed find via a browser (Chrome) but accessing the site via my java client produced the exception javax.net.ssl.SSLPeerUnverifiedException

What I had not done was provide a "certificate chain" file when installing my certificate on my ELB instance (see https://serverfault.com/questions/419432/install-ssl-on-amazon-elastic-load-balancer-with-godaddy-wildcard-certificate)

We were only sent our signed public key from the signing authority so I had to create my own certificate chain file. Using my browser's certificate viewer panel I exported each certificate in the signing chain. (The order of the certificate chain in important, see https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=222086)

Solution 4:

Here is what you can do:-

Exim SSL certificates

By default, the /etc/exim.conf will use the cert/key files:

/etc/exim.cert
/etc/exim.key

so if you're wondering where to set your files, that's where.

They're controlled by the exim.conf's options:

tls_certificate = /etc/exim.cert
tls_privatekey = /etc/exim.key

Intermediate Certificates

If you have a CA Root certificate (ca bundle, chain, etc.) you'll add the contents of your CA into the exim.cert, after your actual certificate.

Probably a good idea to make sure you have a copy of everything elsewhere in case you make an error.

Dovecot and ProFtpd should also read it correctly, so dovecot no longer needs the ssl_ca option. So for both cases, there is no need to make any changes to either the exim.conf or dovecot.conf(/etc/dovecot/conf/ssl.conf)