Re: Testing the gnutls support

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Sat, 09 Oct 2010 23:50:55 -0500 Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> wrote: 

TZ> 1) we should be verifying the host name matches the certificate--but
TZ> should this be done in gnutls.el or gnutls.c?

This is done in gnutls.c (using a host name passed through
`gnutls-negotiate' from gnutls.el) now.  The verification can be turned
off.

TZ> 2) we should set up a verification callback (but this is not available
TZ> in mainstream Debian/Ubuntu yet, since it's new in 2.10).  In the
TZ> callback we should let the user accept an invalid certificate.  I'd like
TZ> to defer this until 2.10 is in the Debian mainstream.

TZ> 3) We should give users a way to accept certificates.  Right now they
TZ> can pass a list of trust file names themselves but I think this should
TZ> be a more general facility.

I am not sure this is useful as part of the GnuTLS connection mechanism
because pausing external network-level C functions to interact with the
user can cause some serious bugs.  It seemed like a good approach but
after working with the GnuTLS code I'm pretty sure it will cause
problems long-term.

It's probably cleaner to save every invalid certificate in a list and
give the user a UI to choose which certificates they wish to accept,
perhaps linking to the last validation failure and whatever else will
help the user identify which certificates he wants to accept (maybe a
hash ID of the certificate in the messages buffer).

Any opinions?

Ted