On Mon, Aug 7, 2017 at 12:53 AM, Franck Leroy via dev-security-policy
<dev-security-policy@lists.mozilla.org> wrote:
> Hello
>
> I checked only one but I think they are all the same.
>
> The integer value of the serial number is 20 octets, but when encoded into
> DER a starting 00 may be necessary to mark the integer as a positive value :
>
> 0 1606: SEQUENCE {
> 4 1070: SEQUENCE {
> 8 3: [0] {
> 10 1: INTEGER 2
> : }
> 13 21: INTEGER
> : 00 A5 45 35 99 1C E2 8B 6D D9 BC 1E 94 48 CC 86
> : 7C 6B 59 9E B3
>
> So the serialNumber (integer) value is 20 octets long but lenght can be more
> depending on the encoding representation.
>
> Here is ASCII (common representation when stored into a database:
> "A54535991CE28B6DD9BC1E9448CC867C6B599EB3" it is 40 octets long, VARCHAR(40)
> is needed.
The text from 5280 says:
" CAs MUST force the serialNumber to be a non-negative integer, that
is, the sign bit in the DER encoding of the INTEGER value MUST be
zero. This can be done by adding a leading (leftmost) `00'H octet if
necessary. This removes a potential ambiguity in mapping between a
string of octets and an integer value.
As noted in Section 4.1.2.2, serial numbers can be expected to
contain long integers. Certificate users MUST be able to handle
serialNumber values up to 20 octets in length. Conforming CAs MUST
NOT use serialNumber values longer than 20 octets."
This makes it somewhat whether the `00'H octet is to be included in
the 20 octet limit or not. While I can see how one might view it
differently, I think the correct interpretation is to include the
leading `00'H octet in the count. This is because
CertificateSerialNumber is defined as being an INTEGER, which means
"octet" is not applicable. If it was defined as OCTET STRING, similar
to how KeyIdentifier is defined, then octet could be seen as applying
to the unencoded value. However, given this is an INTEGER, the only
way to get octets is to encode and this requires the leading bit to be
zero for non-negative values.
That being said, I think that it is reasonable to add "DER encoding of
Serial must be 20 octets or less including any leading 00 octets" to
the list of ambiguities that CAs must fix by date X, rather than
something that requires revocation.
Thanks,
Peter
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