Why I no longer have an old-school cert on my https site

At the start of 2023, I wrote a post talking about why I still had an "old-school cert" on my https site. Well, things have shifted, and it's time to talk about why.

I've been aware of the ACME protocol for a while. I have tech notes going back as far as 2018, and every time I looked at it, I recoiled in horror. The whole thing amounts to "throw in every little bit of webshit tech that we can", and it makes for a real problem to try to implement this in a safe and thorough way.

Many of the existing clients are also scary code, and I was not about to run any of them on my machines. They haven't earned the right to run with privileges for my private keys and/or ability to frob the web server (as root!) with their careless ways.

That meant I was stuck: unwilling to bring myself to deal with the protocol while simultaneously unwilling to budge on allowing the cruft code of existing projects into my life.

Well, time passed, and I managed to crack some of my own barriers. It wasn't by using the other projects, though. I started ripping into them to figure out just how the spec really worked, and started biting off really really small pieces of the problem. It took a particular forcing function to get me off my butt and into motion.

About six months ago, I realized that it was probably time to get away from Gandi as a registrar and also SSL provider (reseller). They had been eaten by private equity some years before, and the rot has been setting in. Their "no bullshit" tagline is gone, and their prices have been creeping up. I happened to renew my domains for multiple years and have been insulated for a while, but it was going to be a problem in 2025.

Giving them the "yeet" was no big deal, but the damn rbtb certificate was going to be a problem. Was I going to start paying even more for the stupid thing every year, or was I going to finally suck it up and deal with ACME?

That still left the problem of overcoming my inherent disgust for the entire protocol and having to deal with all of these encodings they force upon you. My first steps towards the solution involved writing really small and stupid utility functions and libraries that would come in handy later. I'm talking about wrapping jansson (a C library that handles JSON) so that it made sense in my C++ world and I could import JSON (something I use as little as possible). That kind of thing.

This also meant going down some dead-ends, like noticing that libraries existed which would allegedly create certain things (like a JWK) for you, and then realizing that they were not going to make my life any easier. I'd poke at it, reach my limit, and then swear and walk away for another couple of days.

This went on for some time. I have a series of notes where I'd grab a piece of the problem, wrangle it around for a while, get grossed out, and then set it down and go do something else. This just kept happening but I slowly made progress with small pieces that would Do Stuff, and then they'd connect to each other, and so on like this.

One positive development during all of this was discovering this "pebble" test server I could run on an isolated fake system. It would act as an ACME server and would let me harass it with my feeble attempts at implementing a client instead of bothering the real CAs. Even "staging" servers deserve better treatment than active development, after all.

And, well, after a whole lot of mangling and dead-ends and rewrites and other terrible crap, I had an awful little tool that would take a CSR, do all of the idiot dances and would plop out a certificate. I pointed it at Let's Encrypt staging, and it worked. Then I pointed it at their prod site, and _that_ worked. So I did it for the real thing ([www.]rachelbythebay.com), and *that* worked, and I dropped it into place.

Thus, for the past couple of weeks, if you've been hitting the https version of my site, you've been doing it across the new setup.

Now, I took notes about this, and I wanted to share some of my original off-the-cuff thoughts about implementing this for anyone who's similarly broken in the head and wants to see how bad it can be. I will note that I wrote this based on the first thing that worked, and it does not necessarily reflect the implementation I'm on a few weeks later.

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Make an RSA key for your web site. Then make a CSR for it, setting the CN and adding a matching altname as an extension. No other fields matter. Nobody looks at those, anyway, and none of them will influence your final certificate no matter how prosaic or precise you get in there.

Make an RSA key of 4096 bits. Call it your personal key.

Write something that'll read a CSR. It needs to extract the CN and the SANs - the DNS: ones, at least. Ensure there's actually a CN [*] and actually SANs, and that the CN occurs within the SANs. So, yes, you have to have at least one SAN.

[* - I now know you can run with just SANs. I did not at the time.]

Write something that'll do a HTTP GET to which is given to you by the ACME service operator. It then needs to parse the body as JSON (or die) and extract some strings from the top-level object: "newNonce", "newAccount" and "newOrder" at the very least.

Write something that'll read an RSA key file on disk. It needs to extract the publicExponent (probably 65537, but you never know...) and the modulus. Make it read your personal key from earlier.

If you end up using "openssl rsa -in foo -noout -text" to do this, the modulus is a bunch of printed hex digits, like "00:ff:11:ab:cd:ef:22:33". It hard-wraps the output and also indents the lines, so you get to clean all of that up first.

Skip the first 00 for some inexplicable reason. Take the other bytes of the modulus and turn them into the actual character values, so a literal 0xff, 0x11, 0xab, 0xcd and so on down the line in the same order you find them in the file. Hang on to these values for later.

Write something that'll turn an ordinary integer into its equivalent big-endian bag of bytes, but don't pad it out to any particular alignment. You need to take that "65537" from your publicExponent and turn it into the equivalent bytes, so 0x01, 0x00, 0x01. Yes, it's a number you just turned back into a binary representation.

Write something that will do base64 *style* encoding, but not quite. The last two characters in the encoding set are usually + and /, but that won't do for webshit, so you need to make it use - and _ instead.

Take that publicExponent (65537), pump it through your big-endian bag-of-bytes encoder to get 0x01 0x00 0x01, then put it through your "base64web" encoder to get "AQAB".

Start a new JSON object. Add a string called "e" and set it to the output of the above step. So, yes, instead of saying that "e" equals "65537", you're saying that "e" equals "AQAB". Aren't you glad you did those extra steps?

Add another string called "kty" and set it to "RSA".

Add another string called "n" and set it to the "base64web" version of your modulus bag-of-bytes from earlier.

Take this JSON object and make it into a sorted compact string representation. This means it goes "e, kty, n" and it also has all of the usual padding (spaces) squished out. Call this a JWK string and save it for later.

Create a second JSON object. Add a boolean to it named "termsOfServiceAgreed" that's set to true. (Guess you'd better agree...)

Look up the URL for "newNonce" from the directory JSON you got earlier.

Make a HTTP HEAD request to that URL. Dig around in the headers (not the body, since there is no body on a HEAD) until you find "Replay-Nonce". Extract the value of that header. Hang onto it for later.

Look up the URL for "newAccount" from that directory JSON for before.

Create a third JSON object. Add a string to it called "url". Set it to that (newAccount) URL. Add a string called "alg". Set it to "RS256". Add a string called "nonce" and set it to the value from the *header* in that last HTTP HEAD request.

Add an object to this third object called "jwk". Within it, add "e", "kty" and "n" in a manner that matches what you did earlier (you know, from the "JWK string" you're still holding for later).

Dump this third JSON object to a sorted compact string representation. Call it "protected".

Dump the second JSON object to a sorted compact string representation. Call it "payload".

Create a string where you literally concatenate those two prior strings, such that it's the value of protected, then an actual period (as in 0x2e, a full stop, whatever), then the value of payload.

Write something that'll create a SHA256 digest of an arbitrary string and will sign it with an arbitrary RSA key (like "openssl dgst -sha256 -sign "). The key in question is your personal key.

Pump that "." string through the digest function. Then run it through your "base64web" encoder. Call this the signature.

Create a fourth JSON object. Add a string called "protected" and set it to whatever you built a few steps earlier. Add another string called "payload" and set it likewise. Then add one called "signature" and set it, too.

Take this fourth JSON object and dump it to a sorted compact string representation. Call this your post body.

Make a HTTP POST request to the "newAccount" URL from the directory. Set the content-type to "application/jose+json". Set the post data to the post body string from the previous step.

Dig around in the headers of the response, looking for one named "Location". Don't follow it like a redirection. Why would you ever follow a Location header in a HTTP header, right? Nope, that's your user account's identifier! Yes, you are a URL now. Hang on to that URL for later.

You now have an account.

You still have much to do.

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That's about where I stopped writing my take on the protocol.

Again, my program no longer works quite like this, but this is where it started after having observed a bunch of other stuff that already existed.

So far, we have (at least): RSA keys, SHA256 digests, RSA signing, base64 but not really base64, string concatenation, JSON inside JSON, Location headers used as identities instead of a target with a 301 response, HEAD requests to get a single value buried as a header, making one request (nonce) to make ANY OTHER request, and there's more to come.

We haven't even scratched the surface of creating an order, dealing with authorizations and challenges, the whole "key thumbprint" thing, what actually goes into those TXT records, and all of that other fun stuff.

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Random side note: while looking at existing ACME clients, I found that at least one of them screws up their encoding of the publicExponent and ends up interpreting it as hex instead of decimal. That is, instead of 65537, aka 0x10001, it reads it as 0x65537, aka 415031!

Somehow, this anomaly exists and apparently doesn't break anything? I haven't actually run the client in question, but I imagine people are using it since it's in apt.

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This complexity must be job security for somebody. Maybe multiple somebodies.