[gnutls-help] certtool: Serial number only 31 bit?

[Josef Wolf]

On Thu, May 15, 2014 at 01:49:14PM +0200, Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos wrote:
> On Thu, May 15, 2014 at 12:08 PM, Josef Wolf <jw at raven.inka.de> wrote:
> > Hello,
> > I am currently trying to use UUIDs (as Bignum) for the serial number of
> > certificates. AFAIK, the RFC 5280 allows up to 20 octets. But I have a hard
> > time to specify more than 31 bits in the template file.
> > With a prefix of 0x (indicating hex number), I get serial number 0. Ough!
> > Given as a decimal number, the number is truncated to 0x7fffffff.
> > Is this a limitation in certtool or am I missing something?
> 
> It was a limitation. Support for up to 63-bit serial numbers was added in 3.3.0.

Well, I don't think the limitation is really removed. The RFC specifies this
field to 20 octets. That would be 160 bits, right? To store a UUID, 128 bits
would be needed.

For me, it's not a big  deal. I don't expect to ever need more that 10
certificates per CA. 31 random bits would be more than enough for me. In the
case of a collision, re-generating the certificate would be no big deal.

But for real-world applications, defaulting to (internal generated) UUID
instead of time-based serials would be a _big_ win. IMHO.

-- 
Josef Wolf
jw at raven.inka.de