Certificate Authorities: curl-ca-bundle, certsync, keychain

Landon Fuller landonf at macports.org
Sun Dec 22 10:34:30 PST 2013


Howdy all --

I think certsync is now ready to be relied on by default. Here's a brief status update:

- On-demand Launching:

I've updated certsync to launch via launchd on-demand when relevant files change, rather than staying memory-resident. This eliminates any sort of potential runtime cost; certsync was never large, but it doesn't hurt to not have to run a daemon at all.

- Tiger Support

Tiger is now supported, although actually *running* Tiger turned out to be harder than I expected. I don't have any hardware capable of running Tiger, so I thought i could just bring it up in a VM. As it turns out, Tiger panics on boot under a VM on more modern machines (eg, my nearly 3 year old iMac).

I wound up having to track down the 10.4 kernel bug in question and produced a binary patch I could apply to xnu. If someone else needs to run a Tiger VM for some instance, I've posted the background and the patch here:
	http://landonf.bikemonkey.org/code/macosx/Virtualizing_Tiger_On_Modern_CPUs.20131217.html

In light of this, and the enormous number of API differences between Tiger and Leopard, I'm not really sure maintaining Tiger support makes sense for MacPorts, but I was able to make certsync work regardless.

- Next Steps

If things look good to everyone, I'd like to move all ports over to using certsync as a certificate store, replacing curl-ca-bundle.

In addition, I've started extending certsync to vend a keychain-backed PKCS#11 plugin that can be consumed by p11-kit, Java's PKCS#11 implementation, NSS, etc. This will provide even better integration for modern PKCS#11-aware software. In theory, we should be able to migrate to a fully consistent certificate store across all applications.

-landonf
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