[Pkg-gnutls-maint] Bug#478191: Bug#478191: Is this really the real fix, or only a workaround?

Marc Haber mh+debian-bugs at zugschlus.de
Thu May 22 16:00:06 UTC 2008


On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 05:41:50PM +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> Marc Haber <mh+debian-bugs at zugschlus.de> writes:
> > On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 05:20:21PM +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> >> I think increasing the limit is necessary since there appeared to be
> >> some configurations which ran into the earlier limit.  Possibly 48kb is
> >> excessive, and it could be made smaller.  I think the largest handshake
> >> we saw in reality was 25kb.
> >
> > Yes, but it is bound to grow with Debian's ca-certificates package.
> 
> Only if the ca-certificates package have a default so that users trust
> all CAs in the package.

It looks like it has.

> >> Configuring the list of ca-certificates is possible, as far as I know.
> >> GnuTLS doesn't do any of this, it is in the application.  I suspect exim
> >> is using the ca-certificates debian infrastructure.
> >
> > The exim package does not do anything like that explicitly, and exim's
> > GnuTLS code is quite rudimentary and certainly not Debian-specific.
> 
> Doesn't the debian exim packaging or TLS instructions lead to exim4
> using the CAs in ca-certificates as the trusted CA?

Thanks for asking again, I was tempted to answer again "not that I
know of". Actually, we set tls_verify_certificates to
/etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt which introduces the issue in the
first place.

I think that I'm going to kill the misfeature that exim asks for
client certificates by default, people do not use them anyway.

>   I wouldn't think that upstream exim4 pointed administrators towards
>   debian specific files (although I don't know how this stuff is
>   intended to work).
> 
> I think there is an element of debian-specific configuration or
> documentation that makes this situation happen.

You were right. I apologize.

Greetings
Marc

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