`CertifiedIssuer::from_ca_cert_{pem,der}`?

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
42/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
rust
Domain
cryptography, security

Research direction

Start by comparing CertifiedIssuer with Issuer and the existing Issuer::from_ca_cert_pem and Issuer::from_ca_cert_der APIs. Trace the rcgen-0.13 example in the issue and determine how equivalent PEM and DER loading should expose the existing issuer certificate; done means both requested CertifiedIssuer constructors support the described workflow without the self-signing workaround.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

While upgrading from 0.13 to 0.14, I ran into some difficulties trying to keep the old functionality. Specifically, I would like to have access to the issuer certificate while generating a leaf certificate.

Scouring the changelogs and documentation, I did find CertifiedIssuer which seems to be what I need. Unfortunately I couldn't find a way to load an existing certificate like you can with Issuer (Issuer::from_ca_cert_{pem,der}). So here's the feature request.

Here's a slimmed-down version of my current code using rcgen-0.13:

fn main() -> Result<()> {
    let issuer = load_issuer("path/to/issuer.crt", "path/to/issuer.key")?;
    let leaf = generate(&issuer)?;
    dbg!(leaf);
}

fn load_issuer(cert_pem: &str, key_pem: &str) -> Result<CertifiedKey> {
    let key_pair = KeyPair::from_pem(key_pem)?;
    let cert = {
        let mut params = CertificateParams::from_ca_cert_pem(cert_pem)?;
        // https://github.com/rustls/rcgen/issues/274#issuecomment-2121969453
        params.self_signed(&key_pair)?
    };
    // various checks omitted here ...
    Ok(CertifiedKey { cert, key_pair })
}

pub fn generate(issuer: &CertifiedKey) -> Result<CertifiedKey> {
    let params = {
        let issuer_params = issuer.cert.params();
        let mut params = CertificateParams::new([])?;
        // set certificate expiry to match issuer
        params.not_before = issuer_params.not_before;
        params.not_after = issuer_params.not_after;
        // set other certificate params ...
        params
    };
    let key_pair = KeyPair::generate_for(&PKCS_ED25519)?;
    let cert = params.signed_by(&key_pair, &issuer.cert, &issuer.key_pair)?;
    Ok(CertifiedKey { cert, key_pair })
}

I would like to update load_issuer to return a CertifiedIssuer (and ideally get rid of the self-signing hack), so that I can read from the issuer certificate in generate. But without CertifiedIssuer::from_ca_cert_{pem,der} I don't think it's possible.

Dominant language
Rust
Stars
516
Forks
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