[Rd] r-project.org SSL certificate issues

[Simon Urbanek]

To be clear, this not an issue in the libraries nor R, the certificates on the server were simply wrong. So, no, this has nothing to do with R.

Cheers,
Simon


> On Jun 10, 2020, at 10:45 AM, Henrik Bengtsson <henrik.bengtsson using gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Was this resolved upstream or is this something that R should/could
> fix? If the latter, could this also go into the "emergency release" R
> 4.0.2 that is scheduled for 2020-06-22?
> 
> My $.02
> 
> /Henrik
> 
> 
> On Sun, May 31, 2020 at 8:13 AM Gábor Csárdi <csardi.gabor using gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Btw. it would be also possible to create a macOS R installer that
>> embeds a static or dynamic libcurl with Secure Transport, instead of
>> the Apple default LibreSSL.
>> 
>> This might be too late for R 4.0.1, I don't know.
>> 
>> Gabor
>> 
>> On Sun, May 31, 2020 at 4:09 PM Gábor Csárdi <csardi.gabor using gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> On Sat, May 30, 2020 at 11:32 PM Gábor Csárdi <csardi.gabor using gmail.com> wrote:
>>> [...]
>>>> Btw. why does this affect openssl? That root cert was published in
>>>> 2010, surely openssl should know about it? Maybe libcurl / openssl
>>>> only uses the chain provided by the server? Without trying to use an
>>>> alternate chain?
>>> 
>>> Yes, indeed it seems that old OpenSSL versions cannot handle
>>> alternative certificate chains. This has been fixed in OpenSSL in
>>> 2015, so modern Linux systems should be fine. However, macOS uses
>>> LibreSSL, and LibreSSL never fixed this issue. E.g.
>>> https://github.com/libressl-portable/portable/issues/595
>>> 
>>> r-project.org can be updated to send the new root certificate, which
>>> will solve most of our problems, but we'll probably have issues with
>>> other web sites that'll update slower or never.
>>> 
>>> FWIW I built macOS binaries for the curl package, using a static
>>> libcurl and macOS Secure Transport, so these binaries does not have
>>> this issue.
>>> 
>>> They are at https://files.r-hub.io/curl-macos-static and they can be
>>> installed with
>>> install.packages("curl", repos =
>>> "https://files.r-hub.io/curl-macos-static", type = "binary")
>>> 
>>> They support R 3.2 and up, including R 4.1, and should work on all
>>> macOS versions that the given R release supports.
>>> 
>>> Gabor
>> 
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