Metadata Signing Certificate
The InCommon metadata signing certificate is a long-lived, self-signed certificate containing the public key corresponding to the private metadata signing key. Important details about the metadata signing certificate are shown on this authoritative web page:
Note in particular the certificate fingerprints listed at the top of that page. InCommon Operations certifies that these are the actual fingerprints of the metadata signing certificate. Accept no substitute!
Bootstrapping Trust
To ensure Assuming you trust the metadata registration practices of the InCommon Federation, you will want to verify the XML signature on each and every metadata aggregate you consume. Failure to do so will seriously compromise the security of your metadata refresh process.To , you must verify the XML signature on a SAML each and every metadata aggregate you consume. To do that, you need an authentic copy of the metadata signing certificate, that is, the certificate that contains the public key corresponding to the private InCommon metadata signing key. The certificate must be obtained securely since all subsequent operations depend on it.
To obtain an authentic copy of the metadata signing certificate, perform the following steps:
- Download a copy of the metadata signing certificate via a secure channel
- Compute the SHA-1 and SHA-256 fingerprints of the metadata signing certificate
- Compare the computed fingerprints to the actual fingerprints
The latter two steps guarantee the integrity of the metadata signing certificate so obtained.
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To bootstrap your trusted metadata process, you MUST check the integrity of the metadata signing certificate configured into that process. It is not sufficient to fetch the certificate via a TLS-protected HTTPS connection, which is why the sample procedure shown below does not rely on TLS. |
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You may check the integrity of the downloaded certificate in a variety of ways. For example, on a GNU/Linux system, you could use curl
and openssl
to check perform the integrity first two steps of the metadata signing certificate as followsbootstrap process:
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# get Step 1: Download a copy of the metadata signing certificate via a on md.incommon.orgsecure channel $ MD_CERT_LOCATION=httphttps://mdds.incommon.org/certs/inc-md-cert.pem $ MD_CERT_PATH=/path/to/inc-md-cert.pem $ /usr/bin/curl --silent --dump-header /dev/tty $MD_CERT_LOCATION > $MD_CERT_PATH HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2013 14:01:00 GMT Server: Apache Last-Modified: Wed, 18 Dec 2013 21:08:31 GMT ETag: "150037-4fd-4edd5727611c0" Accept-Ranges: bytes Content-Length: 1277 Connection: close Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 # compute # Step 2: Compute the SHA-1 and SHA-256 fingerprints of the metadata signing certificate $ /bin/cat $MD_CERT_PATH | /usr/bin/openssl x509 -sha1 -noout -fingerprint SHA1 Fingerprint=7D:B4:BB:28:D3:D5:C8:52:E0:80:B3:62:43:2A:AF:34:B2:A6:0E:DD $ /bin/cat $MD_CERT_PATH | /usr/bin/openssl x509 -sha256 -noout -fingerprint SHA256 Fingerprint=2F:9D:9A:A1:FE:D1:92:F0:64:A8:C6:31:5D:39:FA:CF:1E:08:84:0D:27:21:F3:31:B1:70:A5:2B:88:81:9F:5B |
Tip | ||
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The Shibboleth SP on Windows ships with its own |
Step 3: The final step is to compare the computed fingerprints to the actual fingerprints. The latter are shown on this authoritative web page:
If the computed fingerprints match the actual fingerprints, you are done. You may now safely use the certificate Once the certificate file is locally installed, you can use it to verify the signature on the metadata file.