Re: [Trans] Precertificate format

Brian Smith <brian@briansmith.org> Tue, 09 September 2014 20:23 UTC

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Date: Tue, 09 Sep 2014 13:23:27 -0700
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From: Brian Smith <brian@briansmith.org>
To: Stephen Kent <kent@bbn.com>
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Subject: Re: [Trans] Precertificate format
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On Tue, Sep 9, 2014 at 10:30 AM, Stephen Kent <kent@bbn.com> wrote:
> Brian,
>
> Can you re-state your proposal. I'm confused, in part because one does
> not sign anything using a cert; one verifies a signed thing using a public
> key from a cert.

Rick and Carl did a good job of explaining why my line of reasoning
didn't make sense in the first place, regardless of my poor choice of
terminology.

By the way, in draft -04 there are similar abuses of terminology that
should be cleaned up. Here's one example, "The resulting
TBSCertificate [RFC5280] is then signed with either [...] a
special-purpose [...] Precertificate Signing Certificate [...] or, the
CA certificate that will sign the final certificate." There are
probably more.

Also, it might be worth mentioning in the draft that it doesn't make
sense to use a Precertificate Signing Certificate if it has the same
public key as the issuing certificate.

Cheers,
Brian