How To Install Latest Verisign G5 Root Certificates

Dhananjay pinged me today and told me that for their Paypal integration, they had to upgrade to Verisign G5 root certificate.  This was the message from Paypal:

Global security threats are constantly changing, and the security of our merchants continues to be our highest priority. To guard against current and future threats, we are encouraging our merchants to make the following upgrades to their integrations:

1. Update your integration to support certificates using the SHA-256 algorithm. PayPal is upgrading SSL certificates on all Live and Sandbox endpoints from SHA-1 to the stronger and more robust SHA-256 algorithm.
2. Discontinue use of the VeriSign G2 Root Certificate. In accordance with industry standards, PayPal will no longer honor secure connections that require the VeriSign G2 Root Certificate for trust validation. Only secure connection requests that are expecting our certificate/trust chain to be signed by the G5 Root Certificate will result in successful secure connections.

For detailed information on these changes, please reference the Merchant Security System Upgrade Guide. For a basic introduction to internet security, we also recommend these short videos on SSL Certificates and Public Key Cryptography.

There is a support.oracle.com article published on October 16, 2015 which has detailed steps for 11i and R12.1:

How To Install Latest Verisign Root Certificates For Use With Paypal SDK 4.3.X (Doc ID 874433.1)

The Verisign G5 root certificate can be downloaded from:

Paypal Microsite about this change: https://www.paypal-knowledge.com/infocenter/index?page=content&id=FAQ1766&expand=true&locale=en_US

Useful Links

• Download Symantec’s VeriSign G5 Root Certificate
• Download specific server SSL certificates, if required by your server
• Contact PayPal Technical Support

sftp failure due to newline character difference between windows and unix.

Recently I spent almost a full day struggling to make out, why an sftp connection would not work without password, after setting up ssh equivalence.  The keys were correct, the permissions on the directories were correct.  The authorized_keys file looked ok.  I copied the authorized_keys file of another account that was working fine.  When I replaced the authorized_keys after taking backup of original authorized_keys, it started working.  So then I proceeded to check the contents in a hex editor

On the left side you have the authorized_keys file created in Windows.
On the right side you have the same authorized_keys file created in Unix.

If you notice the ends of the lines in the Windows file it shows CR LF, where as unix shows LF.

This difference is well described in the wikipedia article on newline character.

The one mistake I had done this time was create the authorized_keys file in Windows notepad, as I was teaching a Developer how to create authorized_keys file.  Once I used vi on unix to create the authorized_keys file and pasted the same ssh key, sftp started working without prompting for password.  I know that Windows/DOS and Unix have different newline characters.  However, I was not able to apply that knowledge, till I compared the files in hex editor.

Whenever, a techie is able to get to the root cause of a problem, a deep sense of satisfaction is experienced.  I am glad I got the opportunity to troubleshoot and fix the issue by getting to the root cause of the issue.