X.509 certifications for protection malicious network impersonators

An X.509 certificate is a digital certificate that defines the format of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) certificates and provides safety against malicious network impersonators. Man-in-the-middle attacks can be easily initiated without x.509 authentication.

It is widely used for many internet protocols including SSL/TLS connections that are secure protocols for browsing the web. An X.509 certificate, which is either signed by a trusted certificate authority or self-signed, contains a public key as well as the identification of a hostname, company, or individual. It is also used in offline applications such as electronic signatures.

X.509 also defines certificate revocation lists, which is a way to distribute information about certificates that have been declared invalid by a signing authority as well as by a certification path validation algorithm.

What is a Certificate?

A digital certificate is indeed a file or an encrypted password that confirms the authenticity of a device, server, or user by utilizing PKI and cryptography.

Organizations can employ digital certificate authentication to ensure that only trustworthy devices and users can connect to their networks. Another frequent application for digital certificates is to verify the legitimacy of a website to a web browser, often known as a secure sockets layer or SSL certificate.

A digital certificate contains identifying information such as a user’s identity, company, or department, as well as the Internet Protocol (IP) address or the serial number of a device. Digital certificates contain a copy of the certificate holder’s public key, which must be matched to a matching private key to be valid.

Why use X.509 Certificates?

X.509 certificates have several beneficial properties that passwords don’t have. They prove to be advantageous over normal passwords.

• They are phishing resistant; unlike a password, which requires the server to get the actual plain text password to verify you, an X.509 certificate authenticates you by providing a certification path validation algorithm by signing certificates by intermediate CA certificates. A phishing site receives a password that it may then use on the genuine website; X.509 authentication only provides it with a single signature from the certificate and does not provide it with the secret key required to fool you.
• If they are reused on other sites, they pose no risk. If you use your organization password on another website, that website may collect the password or store it inefficiently, allowing it to be stolen in a breach. If you use the same certificate for numerous sites, you don’t have to depend on all of them to secure your credentials (if you use the same password on numerous locations and any of them handles it poorly, it’s exposed for all of them).
• Typically, you will receive individual certificates for each browser or device you own. That implies that if the device is lost, the company might revoke one of them rather than all of them.
• Similarly, there is no chance of shoulder-surfing or a user disclosing his password to colleagues. A user could export the private key, although it is far less likely than a person revealing their password to someone.
• They provide two-factor authentication when used in conjunction with a password (‘something you know’ is a password and ‘something you have’ is a certificate)

How Do X.509 Certificates Work?

The Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1) is the basis for X.509 standards. Using ASN, the X.509 certificate format uses a related public and private key pair to encrypt and decrypt a message.

The CA issues an X.509 certificate to an entity, and that certificate is attached to it like a photo ID badge. Unlike insecure passwords, they cannot be lost or stolen. Using the badge analogy, you can easily imagine how authentication works: the certificate is “flashed” like an ID at the resource requiring authentication.

Public key Infrastructure Basics

A PKI contains a string of randomly generated numbers that can be used to encrypt a message. Only the selected recipient can decrypt and read this encrypted message and can only be deciphered and read by using the associated private key, which is also made of a long string of random numbers.

This private key is kept private and is only known to the recipient. As the public key is published for all the world to see, a complex cryptographic algorithm that generates random numeric combinations of varying lengths is used to create a public key and pair them with an associated private key.

The following are the most often used algorithms for generating public keys:

• Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA)
• Digital signature algorithm (DSA)
• Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC)

Attributes of X.509 certificate

Each certificate has several attributes and fields that contain information about the user, the issuer, and the cryptographic parameters of the certificate itself.

• Version
• Serial number
• Algorithm information
• Issuer name
• Validity period
• Subject distinguished name
• Subject public key information

To learn more about the topic, visit Encryption Consulting