On Mon, Sep 8, 2014 at 4:24 PM, Rick Andrews <[email protected]> wrote:
>> The CA may use a Precertificate Signing Certificate to sign the
>> Precertificate, and then sign the final certificate with the production CA
>> certificate. Then, there would be no duplicate serial number issues.
>
> Brian, even if the CA uses a Precert signing cert, the precert's issuer name
> has to be that of the ultimate issuer, and the serial number has to be that
> of the ultimate certificate, so I don't think that solves the problem.
Thanks for pointing that out. Basically, the cause of that problem is
that a Precertificate is a syntactically-valid X.509 certificate, and
so it could be considered a duplicate of the final certificate. If the
Precertificate weren't a syntactically-valid X.509 certificate, then
there would be no way it could be considered a duplicate. So, why not
make this simple change to the syntax:
enum { x509_entry(0), precert_entry(1), (65535) } LogEntryType;
struct {
LogEntryType entry_type;
select (entry_type) {
case x509_entry: ASN.1Cert;
case precert_entry: ASN.1Precert;
} entry;
ASN.1Cert certificate_chain<0..2^24-1>;
} LogEntry;
opaque ASN.1Cert<1..2^24-1>;
opaque ASN.1Precert<1..2^24-1>;
where the internal syntax of ASN.1Precert is (in ASN.1):
ASN1Precert ::= SEQUENCE {
precertSigningCert [0] EXPLICIT OptionalCertificate,
tbsCertificate TBSCertificate,
signatureAlgorithm AlgorithmIdentifier,
signatureValue BIT STRING }
OptionalCertificate ::= certificate Certificate OPTIONAL;
In other words, ASN1Precert is exactly an X.509 Certificate except
that it starts with an explicitly-tagged, possibly-empty
precertSigningCert field. Thus, no X.509 certificate parser would
parse a precert as though it were a real certificate, and so the
precert could never be considered a duplicate of the final cert.
Additionally, there would be no need for the "poison extension"
because the added precertSigningCert field serves the same purpose.
This strawman only attempts to solve the "duplicate certificate"
problem, not the "must reserve the serial number in advance" problem.
However, I suspect that this change would make it more difficult for
some CAs to create precertificates.
Cheers,
Brian
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