I have bought a domain and certificate from Azure. The certificate is given by Go Daddy as azure partner and it is signed with the intermediate certificate from Go daddy hence it always needs chaining of certificates till Root CA.
Our website is used as a REST interface for our customers and hence clients use Java SDK or plain scripts. In our case precisely with zulu jdk image(11u5-zulu-alpine) from microsoft and even I tried with ubuntu 16.04 LTS and get the same error.
if we try to even curl to our site with proper certificates we get error as below and its because of the intermediate CA is missing!
curl: (60) server certificate verification failed. CAfile: /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt CRLfile: none
With java SDK we get as javax.net.ssl.SSLHandshakeException
I have 3 questions.
And lastly I have a fair idea of how certificates work w.r.t client and server but with the intermediate CA in picture I am unable to understand exactly where the intermediate CA should be put in. I read few posts on the SO but its still unclear. Please bear with me and if some one can explain me the approach how it works in general and what could be the good practice.
- Do we need to bundle the intermediate and root certificate with our domain certificate and deploy it.( the certificate is in pfx format)
You should definitely configure the server to send all required intermediate certs; this is required by the TLS standards. (Although if you don't, clients have the option to try to obtain them by other means, like a cache or repository or AIA, and sometimes they do.) Whether the server sends the root is optional; the standards actually state this in reverse, by saying the server MAY omit the root, where the all-caps 'MAY' invokes the meaning defined in RFC 2119. E.g. for TLS1.2 in RFC5246 7.4.2:
This is a sequence (chain) of certificates. The sender's
certificate MUST come first in the list. Each following
certificate MUST directly certify the one preceding it. Because
certificate validation requires that root keys be distributed
independently, the self-signed certificate that specifies the root
certificate authority MAY be omitted from the chain, under the
assumption that the remote end must already possess it in order to
validate it in any case.
How you do this depends on what web-server software you are using, which you didn't identify. Although from the fact you specify a Java version, I can speculate it might be Tomcat, or something based on Tomcat like Jboss/Wildfly. Even then, Tomcat's SSL/TLS configuration varies substantially depending on the version and which type of connector 'stack' you use (the pure-Java JSSE, or Tomcat Native, aka APR Apache Portable Runtime, which is actually OpenSSL). However, a 'pfx' (PKCS12) file can definitely contain both a privatekey and the matching (EE) certificate PLUS the chain cert(s) it needs, and is a convenient way to deal with the whole kaboodle at once.
For a cert obtained directly from GoDaddy, they provide instructions linked from https://www.godaddy.com/help/install-ssl-certificates-16623 for many common servers. I don't know if for Azure they use any different chaining that would alter these instructions.
If your server is publicly accessible, at port 443, https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest will check if it is correctly handling the chain certs, as well as many other things. There are other tools as well but I am not familiar with them; for non-public servers I usually just look manually.
- Is it a good practice to tell our clients to install the bundle certificates ( root and intermediate) in order to get this working.
Clients should not install intermediate cert(s) because as above the server should send them. The GoDaddy roots have been accepted in most official truststores for several years now, so most clients using default settings should not need to add them. However, some might; in particular Ubuntu 16.04 might be old enough that it doesn't have GoDaddy preinstalled. And any client(s) that wishes to use a customized truststore, and/or a pin, must ensure that it is set to include/allow your cert's trust chain.
- Does GoDaddy needs to update the bundle certificate in the packing repositories of Ubuntu ,alpine Or is my understanding wrong
GoDaddy has supplied its roots to (AFAIK all) the major truststore programs, as above. IINM Ubuntu uses the Mozilla/NSS list, which definitely includes GoDaddy today, but as above I can't be sure about 16.04. I don't know for alpine. CAs do not request truststore programs to include intermediates (although a program or user may be able to add selected intermediate(s) as trusted, depending on the software used).