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Re: [Trans] Bad Technical Decision: Closing out the SCT encoding discussion

Russ Housley <housley@vigilsec.com> Fri, 13 March 2015 21:09 UTC

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From: Russ Housley <housley@vigilsec.com>
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Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2015 17:08:50 -0400
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To: Rob Stradling <rob.stradling@comodo.com>
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Cc: Paul Wouters <paul@nohats.ca>, trans@ietf.org, Melinda Shore <melinda.shore@gmail.com>, Stephen Farrell <stephen.farrell@cs.tcd.ie>
Subject: Re: [Trans] Bad Technical Decision: Closing out the SCT encoding discussion
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Rob:

>> And if we interpret 5280 strictly and conclude that is still a
>> good plan then the question would be what to do about the SCT
>> encoding, which could be to do something hacky like prepending
>> another OCTET STRING tag and a length I suppose,
> 
> Stephen, RFC6962 does precisely that, and the current 6962-bis text aims to do the same.
> 
> Adding yet another OCTET STRING would turn it into an OCTET STRING inside an OCTET STRING inside an OCTET STRING!
> 
> I'd be surprised if Russ or Steve Kent would consider that to be any better than the current plan (an OCTET STRING inside an OCTET STRING).

I will not speak for Steve Kent.  But I do not think tat an extra OCTET STRING wrapping is the way to go.  Sure, it would legalistically conform to the words in RFC 5280, but I think the straightforward use of ASN.1 would be better.

Russ

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