RE: Can you impersonate a client side cert??

[Ed Moyle <emoyle () scsnet csc com>]

Darren,

        Most likely you won't be able to do this.  The web server would have to trust the CA that you choose to issue 
your spurious cert.  If you could get a cert from a CA that the server trusts with the same CN as whoever you are 
trying to impersonate, the built-in cert checking features of most webservers still would not let you impersonate the 
legitimate user provided they are using the built-in cert to user mapping features of the web server.  

        As a caveat, I should note that it is *possible* that some poorly written application software might use just 
CN without regard to issuing CA to do the user mapping (personally I would use SN as issued by a particular CA,) but my 
advice would be to pursue another avenue since this is a pretty big "if."

-E

-----Original Message-----
From: Darren Craig [mailto:darren.craig () celare co uk]
Sent: Monday, January 28, 2002 07:00
To: pen-test () securityfocus com
Subject: Can you impersonate a client side cert??


Hi All,


I have been reading a paper which was published back in Feb 2001 by a
company call Sensepost which says that there is a way to impersonate a users
client side cert by using the same common name. Does anybody have any
experience of doing this or is it even possible considering that the users
public part of the cert would be installed on the web server?

Darren


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