Hacker News Reader

Comment by vader1 | Hacker News Reader

I'm using DAVdroid in combination with Owncloud, which works very well. Unfortunately though the author does not want to add support for self-signed certificates, which is not a huge problem for us technical people (we can manually import the certificate into Android and deal with the silly consequences that brings), but it's a dealbreaker for being able to get the rest of my family off of google and onto owncloud.

View on HN

Yeah, the certificate situation on Android is really sad, if you cannot afford to buy/get a "proper" cert.

I wish more applications would provide an easy way to use self-signed certs without totally compromising security.

Edit: link to davdroid issue: https://github.com/rfc2822/davdroid/issues/3

StartSSL offers free certs.

until they're blacklisted by everyone because nobody revokes their compromised certs because it costs money to do so

StartSSL's heart is in the right place but they're throttling the edge and very close to being ostracized completely.

Looks like we crashed the site. I'm ironically getting SSL errors trying to log in.

Same here. I bought the app last year, but I can't use it without support for self-signed certs.

did you try the authors brand new app? it's called CAdroid and imports self signed certs to android

see: cadroid.bitfire.at (it's free)

I saw it in the app store. Apparently it just imports certificates into Android's cert store -- something that you can easily do with a browser, email or file sharing app.

But it's a sign that support for self-signed certs is coming. Along with this pull request, that he just closed (not sure what the status is):

https://github.com/rfc2822/davdroid/pull/194

Did you try adding your CA to /system/etc/security/ ?

Oh, it works fine for me. The problem is with the average person who doesn't know or want to know what a self-signed certificate is.

"When you first connect, it will show you a popup with a long set of characters. Check if it ends with A4FE and if so, click yes" is the very maximum I might be able to squeeze out of them. Manually importing a certificate in the trust store and dealing with the scary warnings ("Someone is monitoring your connection!") it generates is a no go.

If you add it to that directory it won't show any warnings. Still, not so good for the average person because it requires root and might not persist between updates.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com