Hello, We have decided to use openssl to protect a connection in our system with TLS. Clients will be authenticated using X509 certificates. To cut a long story short, a decision has been taken to use self-signed certificates. On the server, each client's self-signed cert will be loaded by a call to SSL_CTX_load_verify_locations(). This is pretty much working as expected, apart from one thing. If we modify the client's private key (modified a bit in the privateExponent), the TLS connection is still successfully established. I had expected the signature verification (certificate verify message) of the handshake to fail in this case.
Are there any gotchas with self-signed certs? Or is there something else we have missed that explains why the signature verification is successful with the modified key? We are using openssl-0.9.8o. Regards Roger