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Chapter 4: Certificates for Endpoint Security
If you’ve got a web server running, or are confident with option 2, that is OK, but
these steps assume you don’t have a web server running, and thus will need/want to
use the built-in temporary web server that certbot will use to authenticate. This
server is used to prove that you control the domain you’re requesting a certificate for.
Answer the next questions as appropriate, and then at this point you will insert the
hostname that you assigned to the IP address of your server:
Please enter in your domain name(s) (comma and/or space separated) (Enter 'c'
to cancel): asteriskbook.shifteight.org
(replace asteriskbook.shifteight.org with the domain name you assigned).
certbot will perform its magic, and if all went well you should get some sort of mes‐
sage similar to the following:
IMPORTANT NOTES:
- Congratulations! Your certificate and chain have been saved at:
/etc/letsencrypt/live/asteriskbook.shifteight.org/fullchain.pem
Your key file has been saved at:
/etc/letsencrypt/live/asteriskbook.shifteight.org/privkey.pem
Your cert will expire on 2018-07-23. To obtain a new or tweaked
version of this certificate in the future, simply run certbot
again. To non-interactively renew *all* of your certificates, run
"certbot renew"
- Your account credentials have been saved in your Certbot
configuration directory at /etc/letsencrypt. You should make a
secure backup of this folder now. This configuration directory will
also contain certificates and private keys obtained by Certbot so
making regular backups of this folder is ideal.
- If you like Certbot, please consider supporting our work by:
Donating to ISRG / Let's Encrypt: https://letsencrypt.org/donate
Donating to EFF: https://eff.org/donate-le
Don’t forget to donate to the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) or the Elec‐
tronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); they do important work and deserve our support.
You now have the certificates you’ll need for enabling various TLS services on your
system. We’ll put them to use in the next chapter.
Not too difficult, eh?
Bear in mind that most certificates you get from an outside source
will have an expiration date. In the case of LetsEncrypt, the current
validity is three months. If you are going to put certificates into
production, it is up to you to understand how to manage them (for
example, automating renewal, which the LetsEncrypt folks have
done a good job of simplifying).
Securing SIP
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53
Purchasing certificates from a formal certificate authority
If LetsEncrypt certificates do not provide the level of validation you require—for
example, if you need organization validation (OV) or extended validation (EV)—you
will need to obtain the services of a certificate authority that provides such things.
These matters are beyond the scope of this book.
If you have worked through the examples for the self-signed and LetsEncrypt sec‐
tions, you’ll have at least a basic understanding of some of the process of obtaining
certificates from a certificate authority, as many of the steps will be similar.
Securing Media
The certificates we’ve obtained can be used to secure both our signaling, and the pay‐
load itself (i.e., what’s being spoken, or the video being transmitted). Note that the
mechanisms to secure signaling are an SIP protocol thing, and the mechanisms to
secure the media are an RTP protocol thing. Keep in mind that encrypting your SIP
signaling does not mean you’re automatically also encrypting your media (RTP)
traffic.
Encrypted RTP
Encrypting the Real Time Protocol will achieve the effect of securing our media
streams.
There are two mechanisms commonly used to provide media encryption: SDES and
DTLS-SRTP. SDES is a media encryption mechanism that trusts that the signaling is
secure. In other words, if you are using TLS to secure your SIP signaling, then SDES
is likely how your media encryption is being handled.
DTLS-SRTP, on the other hand, does not trust the signaling. It is important because
the WebRTC standard requires that media be encrypted this way.
The certificates we’ve generated here should work in both scenarios. In upcoming
chapters, when we are configuring SIP or WebRTC endpoints, we will cover in more
detail how to use the certificates. For now, it’s enough that we’ve generated the certifi‐
cates and have them available for use.
Conclusion
Make no mistake: security makes everything more complicated. In the good old days,
you could fire up a SIP connection with a half-dozen lines of config and call it a day.
That doesn’t fly anymore, and while that type of configuration will still work (simply
use UDP instead of TLS, and all you need is a password), we decided that starting
with this edition, all configuration examples will choose more secure options