# Tag Info

Accepted

### Does "Shattered" actually show SHA-1-signed certificates are "unsafe"?

Yes, SHA1-signed certificates are unsafe. The SHAttered paper is instructive. From the introduction: The MD-SHA family of hash functions is the most well-known hash function family, which ...
• 45.8k
Accepted

### Who verifies the trust of certificate authorities?

Maarten Bodewes answer is correct but I think the heart of your question is a major hurdle people face in understanding certificates and CAs. I think it's worth elaborating on the part of how this ...
• 596

### Does "Shattered" actually show SHA-1-signed certificates are "unsafe"?

The existence of the SHAttered result is not, I think, in itself a surprise: everyone knows that in theory you can create two streams of bytes that hash to the same value. Google's achievements (which ...
• 85.1k

### Who verifies the trust of certificate authorities?

There has to be some point where you trust something. Operating system come with 'root' certificate authorities. Those certificates are either installed when you install the operating system, or ...
Accepted

### Is PKCS7 a signature format or a certificate format?

So is PKCS7 a signature format or a certificate format or both? Neither. PKCS7 is now Cryptographic Message Syntax(CMS). From the RFC 5652: This syntax is used to digitally sign, digest, ...
• 770
Accepted

### Do certificates need to be stored as encrypted?

What is not so obvious is if the certificates used to verify a TLS connection should be stored as encrypted to. It is likely that the root level certificates will be self signed and have no chain back ...
• 132k
Accepted

### How is OID 2a 86 48 86 f7 0d parsed as 1.2.840.113549?

The question's bytestring 2a 86 48 86 f7 0d 01 01 01 is the Value field of an ASN.1 BER/DER TLV with type 6, which is the Object IDentifier for an RSA key (the Type ...
• 124k

### Smallest possible certificate for IoT device

What is the minimum, secure enough, certificate that you can build? How could I generate it using OpenSSL? Generally you'd need to flatten certificates if you want to go below 256 bytes. X.509 ...
• 85.1k
Accepted

### Clarification on the TLS verification process

The article is wrong, but not there. It's the previous sentence that's incorrect. "The first process is to take the signature on the bottom of the certificate and decrypt it with the CA's public ...
• 4,989

### Who verifies the trust of certificate authorities?

No because the browser that you use has a build in security store, so it is perfectly possible to create a secure connection to the CA. Generally you can only request certs for your specific domain, ...
• 85.1k

### Do certificates need to be stored as encrypted?

Certificates that contains public-keys don't need to be encrypted, as the public-key algorithm ensures that nobody can "decrypt" public-key into private keys. However, there's a special type ...
• 6,621
Accepted

### Must root certificates be self signed?

Among the reason why root public keys are often expressed as a self-signed certificate are: It cryptographically protects against a deliberate alteration of an attribute of the public key (e.g. ...
• 124k
Accepted

### X509 certificate

All the answers can be found in RFC 5280 which defines the X.509 certificate format. 1. What does req_distinguished_name mean and how is this being used? It looks ...
• 3,407
Accepted

### Why is a CSR signed and which key is used for signing?

[Why] is the CSR istself signed? The CSR is signed to ensure consistency of the data in it in a similar way to how root certificates are also self-signed. Additionally signing the CSR proves ...
• 44.6k
Accepted

### Trying to understand the use of ECC in TLS certificates

ECC is indeed used by CloudFlare's website but only for the session key agreement. The authentication is performed using an RSA 2048 bit private key. The corresponding RSA public key is in the ...
• 85.1k
Accepted

### openSSL created CSR signature size of 73 bytes but should't it be 70 bytes

The "extra" octet is needed because ASN.1 uses two's complement notation for integers, per section 8.3.3 of X.690: The contents octets shall be a two's complement binary number equal to the ...
• 1,573
Accepted

### how to let other people respond to emails only decrypt-able with my private key

You are looking for Proxy Re-Encryption. From a high-level viewpoint, a proxy re-encryption scheme is an asymmetric encryption scheme that permits a proxy to transform ciphertexts under Alice's public ...
• 4,832

### Deduce modulus N from public exponent and encrypted data

Given a message $M$, define the corresponding RSA ciphertext as $C = M^e \bmod N$. We assume that the value of $N$ is kept secret. However, the attacker is given oracle access to the encryption: on ...
• 1,699
Accepted

### Creating certificate: Where is my private key stored?

Typically you send a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) to the CA. The CSR contains everything you want to be inside your certificate, including your public key. The CA takes a look, and if it likes it,...
• 2,572

### Smallest possible certificate for IoT device

There are two questions here: What's the minimum, and what's the minimum standard certificate you can build. The former is shorter than the latter, as noted in Maarten Bodewes' answer. If you're ...
• 4,989

### What does "G2" mean when used with X509 certficates and certificate authorities?

Yes, G stands for "Generation". When CA needs to get a new chain they just increment the generation number. For example GoDaddy's signatures: G3 - ...
• 161
Accepted

### How does a certificate authority issue a digital certificate?

Great question. I'll answer it in several parts. Which Keys does Alice send? There are two cryptographic operations that Alice may want to do: encryption/decryption, and signing/validation. You can ...
• 3,407
Accepted

### What information is signed by a Certification Authority?

The information that is signed may differ by certificate, but basically the procedure can be found by looking at RFC 5280 and working downward: 4.1.1.3. signatureValue The signatureValue field ...
• 85.1k
Accepted

### What is the maximum length of a X.509 OID?

OIDs don't have a maximal length / depth specified. There is no real value where you can safely cut them off - or rather reject them (raise an exception or error). Anything over 20 bytes seems ...
• 85.1k
Accepted

### What is the most important piece of information in a X.509 certificate?

As fgrieu says in his comment, the answer to this question is ambiguous; it depends on what you use the certificate for. You can perfectly trust a certificate, without having a CA signature. A CA ...
• 2,083
Accepted

### Why is the signatureAlgorithm field in X.509 certificates redundant?

From RFC 5280 r.e TBSCertificate.signature This field contains the algorithm identifier for the algorithm used by the CA to sign the certificate. This field MUST contain the same algorithm ...
• 789

### Why is the signatureAlgorithm field in X.509 certificates redundant?

There is no difference. RFC 5280 even requires $\tt signatureAlgorithm$ and $\tt signature$ to be the same. According to this discussion on the PKIX mailing list, the reason for the redundancy is that ...
• 1,293
Accepted

### What happens when a root CA loses its private key?

What happens when such a device is lost (fire, electronic fault, stolen, etc)? Assuming the HSM is stolen: The CA will likely inform the police so they can hunt the thief down, then they will ...
• 44.6k