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Re: [Openvpn-users] specify the password for a script?


  • Subject: Re: [Openvpn-users] specify the password for a script?
  • From: Mathias Sundman <mathias@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Sat, 2 Oct 2004 08:36:36 +0200 (CEST)

On Fri, 1 Oct 2004, Erik Anderson wrote:

I saw the PKCS12 feature installed into OpenVPN a little while back and it does excite me, however there's another feature or ability that I'd like to make sure is there before I can start using this.

As far as I know there is no "-nodes" option when creating PKCS12 certificates and my PKI system requires a password for every cert it puts out. Right now I've been setting it to "openvpn" and removing it when converting them to PEM format, but if I were to use the PKCS12-format certificates I would need some kind of --password option in OpenVPN so that I could specify it in the .conf file directly and allow a simulation of the -nodes option.

I'm not sure whether no encryption is used or if the key are encrypted with a NULL passphrase when PKCS12_create() is called with a NULL passphrase.


However, I wrote the PKCS12 support patch for OpenVPN so that it first tries to parse the pkcs12 file with a NULL passphrase, and if that fails, it asks for the passphrase to use.

So as long as you're able to create the pkcs12 file with a NULL passphrase openvpn will start without prompting for passphrase.

Is there a way to programmatically specify the password for a certificate when launching an OpenVPN process?

To support passing the passphrase for OpenVPN GUI to openvpn, I wrote a patch to pass the passphrase as a cmd-line option to OpenVPN. Later I rewrote the GUI to redirect stdin/stdout through a pipe instead, so I didn't have any need for my patch any longer, and no one else raised their voice about needing this feature, so the patch was never applied to the official openvpn release.


Here's my patch if you're interested:

http://www.nilings.se/openvpn/files/patches/openvpn-2.0_beta7-passphrase.patch



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