[ale] openswan is unusable

[David A. De Graaf]

I've posted this query on the fedora-list mailing list, but I think
the security experts at ALE might know the answers and be more
helpful.


Has anyone managed to configure an openswan tunnel under Fedora 13?
The instructions in /usr/share/doc/openswan-doc-2.6.29 may have been
correct once upon a time, but are simply wrong now.

Someone has judged that simple exchange of RSA public/private keys
provides insufficient security, so that actual access to those keys is
further restricted by something called "NSS support", whatever that is.
Unfortunately, they neglected to tell anyone how to penetrate this extra
veil of protection, as far as I have found, thus rendering a valuable
security capability unusable by the good guys (me).

Can anyone point me to lucid and complete documentation of how to use
the "new openswan" system?  After groping through random googleisms, I
found a way to create the needed RSA keys.  Instead of the documented
  ipsec newhostkey --output /etc/ipsec.secrets
one must first create an NSS password, which goes God-knows-where: 
  certutil -N -d /etc/ipsec.d
and then
  ipsec newhostkey --configdir /etc/ipsec.d \
        --output /etc/ipsec.d/ipsec.secrets --password <thepasswd>
to create the ipsec.secrets file, then move it up a level
  mv /etc/ipsec.d/ipsec.secrets /etc/ipsec.secrets

Then you can display the public key in the usual way
  ipsec showhostkey --left
and use it to construct /etc/ipsec.d/net2net.conf based on the example
in <doc>/openswan-doc-2.6.29/config.html.

After doing this on the local and remote gateway machines, so they know
how to communicate and recognize each other, the tunnel ought to work.
But it doesn't.

When I try to start the tunnel there's a mysterious error
  ipsec auto --up net2net
  ...
  003 "net2net" #1: Can't find the private key from the NSS CERT (err -12285) 
  ...
and the negotiation fails.

Can anyone give a clue how to access this very well hidden private key?
Google can't.


-- 
	David A. De Graaf    DATIX, Inc.    Hendersonville, NC
	dad at datix.us         www.datix.us