Re: [PATCH 1/2] http.c: prompt for SSL client certificate password

[Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com>]

Constantine Plotnikov <constantine.plotnikov@gmail.com> writes:
> On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 11:56 AM, Daniel Stenberg<daniel@haxx.se> wrote:
>> On Fri, 12 Jun 2009, Nanako Shiraishi wrote:
>>
>>> It would be ideal if you can inspect the certificate and decide if you
>>> need to ask for decrypting password before using it (and otherwise you don't
>>> ask). If you can't do that, probably you can introduce a config var that
>>> says "this certificate is encrypted", and bypass your new code if that
>>> config var isn't set.
>>
>> Is this really a common setup? Using an unencrypted private key sounds like
>> a really bad security situation to me. The certificate is never encrupted,
>> the passphrase is for the key.
>>
> For SSH using unencrypted private key is very common for scripting and
> cron jobs. For HTTPS situation looks like being worse since there is
> no analog of ssh-agent that covers at least some of scripting
> scenarios. Do we want to disable scripting for HTTPS?

Actually you can use _encrypted_ private keys together with ssh-agent
and for example keychain helper for scripting.  You have to provide
password to all listed private keys only once at login.  I wonder if
something like this would be possible for HTTP certificates...

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland
ShadeHawk on #git