ITU-T recommendations for X.509v3 certificates

Peter Gutmann pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz
Thu Nov 8 21:28:13 EST 2007


Florian Weimer <fw at deneb.enyo.de> writes:

>I'm looking for a halfway self-contained set of ITU-T recommendations which
>are relevant for implementing X.509v3 certificates.  The references in RFC
>3280 appear to be incomplete; for instance, a reference for ASN.1 itself is
>missing.
>
>Or is it unreasonable to expect that the specs match what is actually needed
>for interoperability with existing implementations (mostly in the TLS, S/MIME
>area)?

There is very little correspondence between PKI specs and reality.  As I put
it in one analysis on X.509 implementation flaws, "You cannot build an
implementation so broken that it can't claim to be X.509" (I know of at least
one instance in which deeply-buried PGP was sold as X.509).  See part 2a of
the Godzilla crypto tutorial,
http://www.cypherpunks.to/~peter/T2a_X509_Certs.pdf, for a few examples.

Having said that, if all you want is interoperability then you should be fine.
The brokenness in X.509 implementations creates a self-sustaining cycle in
which applications that accept certs are more or less oblivious to anything
that's in the cert (beyond basic stuff like correct formatting and encoding,
and so on), so you can get away with almost anything (and then in turn because
apps will accept anything, cert creators can create arbitrarily broken certs
without being caught out by it, so the cycle is self-sustaining).

So if you want to do the minimum amount of work, all you need is some
approximation to a DN, maybe a basicConstraints, and if you're feeling really
enthusiastic, keyUsage (although this is often ignored by implementations, see
the part 2a slides for examples.  Even basicConstraints, the single most
fundamental extension in a certificate, and in most cases just a single
boolean value, was widely ignored until not too long ago).

If you want to be really lazy, use an X.509v1 cert where you don't even need
to bother with extensions.  A downside (?) of this is that some applications
will treat it as a CA root cert.

Peter.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com



More information about the cryptography mailing list