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 _______________________________________________ dev-security-policy mailing list dev-security-policy@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-security-policy