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Rename and better document the UnknownIssuer error #221

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briansmith opened this issue Apr 21, 2021 · 2 comments
Open

Rename and better document the UnknownIssuer error #221

briansmith opened this issue Apr 21, 2021 · 2 comments

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@briansmith
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UnknownIssuer is a name that comes from my historical involvement in other certificate validation libraries. It isn't a good name. We should change it to something that better says "we couldn't build a chain." And we should document the various likely reasons why we couldn't build a chain. We might even be able to encode (some of) the possibilities of chain building in code, e.g. in an enum of errors that all eventually get mapped to this error.

@briansmith
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As I mentioned on Twitter, the most common reasons I'm aware of are:

  • The application didn't add the required trust anchor to the Rustls root store they are using.
  • The root (or an intermediate) is using RSA 1024 and/or SHA-1 in one of the signatures in the chain.
  • The server didn't send the right intermediate certificates to allow us to build a chain.

See also #206.

@tialaramex
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Would it be valuable to help brainstorm a better name to replace UnknownIssuer ? Or is it more valuable to experiment with tweaks to webpki that don't make it more complicated but do give us different errors we can then try to name ?

I would like to help here, and I have a few ideas about how to help people who've received the hypothetical future improved error (or errors) and need more help, from outside the webpki crate - but of course to get them there they need to know they need that help. And maybe we can just make this so awesome it's unnecessary to do more.

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