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Using DNSDB With openssl s_client To Scan A List of Hosts For Expired SSL/TLS Certificates

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I. Introduction

A typical company may have dozens or hundreds of hosts with SSL/TLS certificates, the crucial bit of glue that enables encrypted ("https") connections to web servers that may be running on those hosts.

Unfortunately, sometimes there can be problems with SSL/TLS certificates. One of the most common issues is for a certificate to expire before it gets renewed. When that (or other issues) arise with a cert, web browsers such as Chrome or Firefox won't trust those hosts, typically throwing up a scary-looking warning message. For example:

Figure 1. Sample Firefox Warning When Encountering An Expired Cert

If you want to do a thorough check of a web site's crypto and cert usage, Qualys SSL Labs provides a nice free web-based tester (see Qualys SSL Labs )

That Qualys SSL Labs testing tool is truly brilliant!

Sometimes, though, you may just want to do a 'quick-and-dirty' check of all the hosts under a domain for a particular issue (such as expired certs). For that, the Qualys tester may be overkill, sort of like swatting a mosquito with a sledge hammer.

For a straightforward jobs like checking for expired certs, we'll just check it directly ourselves – describing how to do it takes longer than actually just doing it.

The first thing we'll need is a list of publicly-visible hosts for the domain name of interest.

II. Getting A List Of Publicly Visible Hosts Under a Domain

DNSDB can be used to provide a list of all recently-seen publicly-visible hosts for a given delegation point. For example the following command will return a list of farsightsecurity.com hosts:

$ dnsdbq -r \*.farsightsecurity.com -A90d -j | jq -r '.rrname' | sort -u | sed 's/\.$//' > temp.txt

Decoding that command pipeline:

  • dnsdbq is a popular command-line DNSDB query client (see https://github.com/dnsdb/dnsdbq ).

  • -r \*.farsightsecurity.com means "please show us all the owner names (fully qualified domain names) that end in .farsightsecurity.com"

  • -A90d means "limit results to those seen in the last 90 days"

  • -j means "please provide the output in JSON Lines format" (see http://jsonlines.org/ )

  • | "pipes" the output from the preceding command to the next command in the pipeline

  • jq – jq is a JSON "Swiss Army knife," see https://github.com/stedolan/jq

  • -r means "tell jq to send its output in raw format, e.g., without enclosing double quote marks"

  • '.rrname' specifies the field we want to select

  • sort -u sorts and uniquifies the data, eliminating duplicate observations

  • sed 's/\.$//' will strip the trailing dot from each name

  • > temp.txt writes the output to the temporary file temp.txt

The output in temp.txt then looks like:

_spf.farsightsecurity.com
archive.farsightsecurity.com
back.farsightsecurity.com
dl.farsightsecurity.com
dl.iad1.farsightsecurity.com
farsightsecurity.com
front-update.farsightsecurity.com
front.farsightsecurity.com
info.farsightsecurity.com
lists.farsightsecurity.com
my.farsightsecurity.com
support.farsightsecurity.com
www-dyn.farsightsecurity.com
www.farsightsecurity.com

So now we have a list of hosts we can test for expired certs.

But how can we actually test them? Let's try the openssl s_client command.

III. The openssl s_client Command

OpenSSL (see https://www.openssl.org/ ) is a popular cryptographic library that often is used to handle the cryptographic "heavy lifting" for secure web sites. In addition to supporting secure web sites, it also includes some handy command line tools, such as openssl s_client.

The basic form of the openssl s_client command that we're going to use is:

openssl s_client -connect <hostname>:<portnumber> -servername <hostname>

We'll need to make two tweaks to that. We need to ensure that we:

So as a concrete example, if we wanted to just check www.farsightsecurity.com on the standard https port (port 443), we'd run:

$ timeout 10 openssl s_client -connect www.farsightsecurity.com:443 -servername www.farsightsecurity.com <<< "Q"

Voluminous output will then follow. Part of that output looks like:

depth=2 C = US, O = DigiCert Inc, OU = www.digicert.com, CN = DigiCert Global Root CA
verify return:1
depth=1 C = US, O = DigiCert Inc, CN = DigiCert SHA2 Secure Server CA
verify return:1
depth=0 C = US, ST = CA, L = San Mateo, O = "Farsight Security, Inc.", CN = farsightsecurity.com
verify return:1
[additional content omitted here]
---
DONE

That output shows that the cert has not expired and in fact, if we "double check" with the Qualys tester, it actually gives the site's SSL/TLS configuration an A+ evaluation.

Now let's see what an expired cert would look like.

IV. An Example of An Expired Cert Found With openssl s_client

Sometimes certs are intentionally non-renewed. For example, Farsight has a host that's slated for decommissioning, so we intentionally haven't bothered to renew its cert. If we try to connect to that host with openssl s_client, we see:

$ timeout 10 openssl s_client -connect <elided>.fsi.io:443 -servername <elided>.fsi.io <<&lt Q
CONNECTED(00000005)
depth=2 C = US, O = DigiCert Inc, OU = www.digicert.com, CN = DigiCert Global Root CA
verify return:1
depth=1 C = US, O = DigiCert Inc, CN = DigiCert SHA2 Secure Server CA
verify return:1
depth=0 C = US, ST = CA, L = San Mateo, O = "Farsight Security, Inc.", CN = <elided>.fsi.io
verify error:num=10:certificate has expired
notAfter=Apr 16 12:00:00 2019 GMT
verify return:1
[snip]

If we double check that same server on the Qualys site, it receives a T (untrusted) rating because the certificate for the site has expired, confirming the results reported by openssl s_client

V. Applying Our openssl s_client Check To A List of Hosts From DNSDB

Assuming we've got a list of hostnames to test in the file temp.txt from section II, we could build a little script to read and run tests for the names of interest, but since we only have a handful of names, we can also just build a script to test those hosts by saying:

$ awk '{print "timeout 10 openssl s_client -connect", $1, ":443 -servername ", $1, "<<< Q"}' < temp.txt | sed 's/ :/:/' > temp2.txt

Decoding that command pipeline:

  • awk is GNU awk, a popular Unix text manipulation tool (see https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/ )

  • the string in the tick marks immediately after the awk command prints some literal text (the stuff in double quote marks), plus the name of the domain (the two places where you see $1)

  • < temp.txt says to take input from the file temp.txt

  • | is the pipe command, taking the output from one command and piping it to the next command

  • sed is the stream editor, used in this case to remove a pesky space that would otherwise sneak in before the colon

  • > temp2.txt says send the output from this command to the file temp2.txt

Once we run this command, our command file (temp2.txt) looks like:

timeout 10 openssl s_client -connect _spf.farsightsecurity.com:443 -servername  _spf.farsightsecurity.com <<< Q
timeout 10 openssl s_client -connect archive.farsightsecurity.com:443 -servername  archive.farsightsecurity.com <<< Q
timeout 10 openssl s_client -connect back.farsightsecurity.com:443 -servername  back.farsightsecurity.com <<< Q
[etc]

All-in-all, there were 14 lines in that file:

$ wc -l temp2.txt
      14 temp2.txt

We'll then run the commands in temp2.txt by saying:

$ bash temp2.txt &> temp3.txt

When we look at the output in temp3.txt, ten of those hosts had certs:

$ grep "BEGIN CERTIFICATE" temp3.txt | wc -l
      10

Reviewing the temp3.txt output file in an editor, we can confirm that none of the certs were in fact expired (search that file for expired).

VI. Conclusion

You've now seen how you can use DNSDB in conjunction with the openssl s_client tool to find expired SSL/TLS certificates for hosts under a given domain.

Isn't it time you got access to DNSDB, so you can check your domains at scale, too?

For more information about DNSDB, contact Farsight Sales at sales@farsightsecurity.com or give them a call at +1-650-489-7919  

Joe St Sauver Ph.D. is a Distinguished Scientist with Farsight Security®, Inc.

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