Contents: About Certificates Requirements Installing SSLeay Setting Up SSL Proxy SSL Configuration Options This appendix describes how to set up Samba to use secure connections between the Samba server and its clients. The protocol used here is Netscapes Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). For this example, we will establish a secure connection between a Samba server and a Windows NT workstation. Before we begin, we will assume that you are familiar with the fundamentals of public-key cryptography and X.509 certificates. If not, we highly recommend Bruce Schneiers Applied Cryptography, 2nd Edition (Wiley) as the premiere source for learning the many secret faces of cryptography. If you would like more information on Samba and SSL, be sure to look at the document SSLeay.txt in the docs/textdocs directory of the Samba distribution, which is the basis for this appendix.
A.1 About Certificates
Here are a few quick questions and answers from the SSLeay.txt file in the Samba documentation, regarding the benefits of SSL and certificates. This text was written by Christian Starkjohann for the Samba projects.
A.1.1 What is a Certificate?
A certifcate is issued by an issuer, usually a Certification Authority (CA), who confirms something by issuing the certificate. The subject of this confirmation depends on the CAs policy. CAs for secure web servers (used for shopping malls, etc.) usually attest only that the given public key belongs the given domain name. Company-wide CAs might attest that you are an
employee of the company, that you have permissions to use a server, and so on.
A.1.2 What is an X.509 certificate, technically?
Technically, the certificate is a block of data signed by the certificate issuer (the CA). The relevant fields are:
Unique identifier (name) of the certificate issuer Time range during which the certificate is valid Unique identifier (name) of the certified object Public key of the certified object The issuers signature over all the above
If this certificate is to be verified, the verifier must have a table of the names and public keys of trusted CAs. For simplicity, these tables should list certificates issued by the respective CAs for themselves (self-signed certificates).
A.1.3 What are the implications of this certificate structure?
Four implications follow:
Because the certificate contains the subjectss public key, the certificate and the private key together are all that is needed to encrypt and decrypt. To verify certificates, you need the certificates of all CAs you trust. The simplest form of a dummy-certificate is one that is signed by the subject. A CA is needed. The client cant simply issue local certificates for servers it trusts because the server determines which certificate it presents.
A.2 Requirements To set up SSL connections, you will need to download two programs in addition to Samba: SSLeay Eric Youngs implementation of the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol as a series of Unix programming libraries SSL Proxy
A freeware SSL application from Objective Development, which can be used to proxy a secure link on Unix or Windows NT platforms These two products assist with the server and client side of the encrypted SSL connection. The SSLeay libraries are compiled and installed directly on the Unix system. SSL Proxy, on the other hand, can be downloaded and compiled (or downloaded in binary format) and located on the client side. If you intend to have a Windows NT client or a Samba client on the other end of the SSL connection, you will not require a special setup.
SSL Proxy, however, does not work on Windows 95/98 machines. Therefore, if you want to have a secure connection between a Samba server and Windows 95/98 client, you will need to place either a Unix server or a Windows NT machine on the same subnet with the Windows 9 x clients and route all network connections through the SSL-Proxy-enabled machine. See Figure A.1. Figure A.1: Two possible ways of proxying Windows 95/98 clients
For the purposes of this chapter, we will create a simple SSL connection between the Samba server and a Windows NT client. This configuration can be used to set up more complex networks at the administrators discretion.
Table of Contents Chapter 1: Learning the Samba Chapter 2: Installing Samba on a Unix System Chapter 3: Configuring Windows Clients Chapter 4: Disk Shares Chapter 5: Browsing and Advanced Disk Shares Chapter 6: Users, Security, and Domains Chapter 7: Printing and Name Resolution
Chapter 8: Additional Samba Information Chapter 9: Troubleshooting Samba
