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Re: Normative reference for 'CA rollover'?




Believe it or not, the new-in-old and old-in-new procedure is documented in CMP. Many people fail to find it there. Perhaps it should be extracted from there and published as a BCP.

Russ

At 10:47 AM 4/2/2009, max pritikin wrote:


Hi folks,

I'm looking for a normative reference describing how a CA would
'rollover' to a new keypair or 'modified' certificate.

RFC5280 includes the following statements about 'rollover', here
quoted with minimal context:

   4.2.1.10 Name Contraints:
   "Name constraints are not applied to self-issued certificates
(unless
   the certificate is the final certificate in the path).  (This could
   prevent CAs that use name constraints from employing self-issued
   certificates to implement key rollover.)"

   6.1. Basic Path Validation:
   "A certificate is self-issued if the same DN appears in the subject
   and issuer fields (the two DNs are the same if they match according
   to the rules specified in Section 7.1).  In general, the issuer and
   subject of the certificates that make up a path are different for
   each certificate.  However, a CA may issue a certificate to itself
to
   support key rollover or changes in certificate policies.  These
   self-issued certificates are not counted when evaluating path length
   or name constraints."

   8.  Security Considerations:
   "Loss of a CA's private signing key may also be problematic.  The CA
   would not be able to produce CRLs or perform normal key rollover."

But it does not include a recommended description of this rollover
process itself.

RFC3647 does not mention rollover at all, although it does define
'renewal' and 'rekey'.

I can find informative discussions of rollover for various CA's
(thanks Google).

Can somebody point me in the right direction? Is there a normative
reference or should I be able to infer the "correct" behavior from end
entity rekey discussions as per the above notes?

Thank you,

- max