[openssl-users] General approach for keeping a client cert from openssl

[Andy Green]

On Mon, 2016-12-19 at 10:21 -0800, Kyle Hamilton wrote:

> You cannot keep the certificate from OpenSSL, as that's the piece
> that you share with the remote side.  This contains the public key,
> and the information bound to that public key by the CA.

Right.

> However, you can keep the private key from being seen by OpenSSL.

Yes, this is the game.

>   There exists what is called an ENGINE interface to offload
> cryptographic operations to a container.  Right now,
> https://wiki.openssl.org/index.php/Creating_an_OpenSSL_Engine_to_use_
> indigenous_ECDH_ECDSA_and_HASH_Algorithms seems to be the best
> documentation available to explain the process of creating it.  

Thanks, I will start with that and try to understand it better.

> Obviously, depending on the type of key you're using, you will
> probably need to figure out the differences.

Yes, it seems it's basically overloading one or more crypto action, so
we need to match the action to what it wants to do with the cert key. 
But I guess to get started, we can do what we have code for.

Thanks again I will study it.

-Andy

> -Kyle H
> 
> On Mon, Dec 19, 2016 at 3:22 AM, Andy Green <andy at warmcat.com> wrote:
> > Hi -
> > 
> > I have a situation coming up that is similar to a client cert being
> > held on a secure key store, like a key vault.
> > 
> > We need to be able to perform TLS communication with a remote
> > server
> > using the key, but without giving the key to OpenSSL.
> > 
> > The "other side" of the "key vault" is smart, and we can run code
> > there, and communicate with it.  So we need to basically proxy
> > OpenSSL
> > operations on the "other side".
> > 
> > I guess this is nothing new under the sun... what's the general
> > approach to integrating this to OpenSSL?
> > 
> > Thanks for any advice.
> > 
> > -Andy
> > --
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> > ers
> > 
> 
>