Educause Security Discussion mailing list archives
Re: Wildcard certs; to use or not to use
From: Kevin Halgren <kevin.halgren () WASHBURN EDU>
Date: Tue, 4 Dec 2012 11:47:56 -0600
It depends on the nature of the content being protected. For much securing much general traffic, a wildcard cert that is centrally managed and well documented is preferable to a large number of individual certs with varying expiration dates all over the place. Moving to wildcard certs has reduced the overhead of managing and tracking all those certs and dates, reducing the incidence of expired certs on active systems to almost nil and enabling us to secure more web traffic than we likely would have if we had to pay for a separate cert for each system. It has also made it easier for us to ensure academic or federated units are maintaining security - when they don't have to absorb the cost of the cert or deal with the administrative overhead it gives them incentive to have us manage the service. Note that we don't hand the wildcard cert out. On the other hand, we don't use it for other types of traffic. We certainly don't use it on anything that relates to PCI other highly sensitive data that would be costly if the traffic were compromised. Kevin ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jacobson, Dick" <dick.jacobson () NDUS EDU> Date: Tuesday, December 4, 2012 11:29 am Subject: Re: [SECURITY] Wildcard certs; to use or not to use To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU ----------------------------------------------------------- |
My understanding is that the Subject Alt Name (SAN) is designed for this scenario – multiple hosts on a single box (IP address ?) – and the wildcard was designed for multiple boxes. We do use wildcard certs – very sparingly !
From: The EDUCAUSE Security Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU] On Behalf Of Brian Helman Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2012 9:44 AM To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU Subject: Re: [SECURITY] Wildcard certs; to use or not to use We have been using wildcard certs for a few years now. We do not use the same cert on all devices. Data Center services (applications) use a couple certs; network devices (e.g. FW, VPN, etc) use another. The cost of a wildcard isn’t that much more than a single-server cert (we use digicert) and it is widely supported. They make cert-management much easier. I would keep a separation of classes of devices you use certs on, but if one is ever compromised, it can always be revoked. -Brian Helman From: The EDUCAUSE Security Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU] On Behalf Of Mike Fox Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2012 10:19 AM To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU Subject: [SECURITY] Wildcard certs; to use or not to use Has anyone used wildcard certs for their university domain? What are the pros and cons? We are in the process of moving our public pages to a hosting site and I've been asked if wildcard certs can be used. I assessed using wild card certs in the past (based on the way they wanted to use them) and deemed the risk was to great. The environment they want to do this in now is with multiple domains on one IP address. Any input would be appreciated. Mike Fox Georgia Southern University Information Security Office (912)478-1592 Jeremiah 29:11-16
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Current thread:
- Wildcard certs; to use or not to use Mike Fox (Dec 04)
- Re: Wildcard certs; to use or not to use Brian Helman (Dec 04)
- Re: Wildcard certs; to use or not to use Jacobson, Dick (Dec 04)
- Re: Wildcard certs; to use or not to use Kevin Halgren (Dec 04)
- Re: Wildcard certs; to use or not to use Jacobson, Dick (Dec 04)
- Re: Wildcard certs; to use or not to use Dennis Bolton (Dec 04)
- Re: Wildcard certs; to use or not to use Jacobson, Dick (Dec 04)
- Re: Wildcard certs; to use or not to use Brian Helman (Dec 04)
- Re: Wildcard certs; to use or not to use Sherry Callahan (Dec 05)