Making checking SSL certificates before installing them a bit more robust / 2019-05-06

With all the automated updates of certificates as described in Enabling Server Name Indication (SNI) on my webserver and Automating Let's Encrypt certificates further I wondered about what would happen when some things got corrupt, most likely as a result of a full disk. And a simple test showed out that the checkcert utility would happily say two empty files are a match because the sha256sum of two empty public keys is the same.

Solution, do something with the errorlevel from openssl. New version of checkcert:

#!/bin/sh

# check ssl private key 1 with ssl pem encoded x509 certificate 2 public key

SUMPRIVPUBKEY=`openssl pkey -in $1 -pubout -outform pem || echo privkey | sha256sum`
SUMCERTPUBKEY=`openssl x509 -in $2 -noout -pubkey -outform pem || echo pubkey | sha256sum`

if [ "${SUMPRIVPUBKEY}" = "${SUMCERTPUBKEY}" ]; then
        exit 0
else
        exit 1
fi

And now:

koos@gosper:~$ /usr/local/bin/checkcert /dev/null /dev/null
unable to load key
139636148224064:error:0906D06C:PEM routines:PEM_read_bio:no start line:../crypto/pem/pem_lib.c:686:Expecting: ANY PRIVATE KEY
unable to load certificate
139678825668672:error:0906D06C:PEM routines:PEM_read_bio:no start line:../crypto/pem/pem_lib.c:686:Expecting: TRUSTED CERTIFICATE
koos@gosper:~$ echo $?
1