Validate TSA certificate chain at timestamp issuance time#1384
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Use the timestamp's own time for certificate chain validation by default, so verification succeeds even after the TSA certificate has expired. Callers can override via VerifyOpts.CurrentTime. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> Signed-off-by: Cody Soyland <cody.soyland@chainguard.dev>
Codecov Report✅ All modified and coverable lines are covered by tests. Additional details and impacted files@@ Coverage Diff @@
## main #1384 +/- ##
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- Coverage 52.85% 26.38% -26.47%
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Files 20 55 +35
Lines 1209 3134 +1925
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+ Hits 639 827 +188
- Misses 509 2254 +1745
+ Partials 61 53 -8 ☔ View full report in Codecov by Sentry. 🚀 New features to boost your workflow:
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Hayden-IO
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Jun 2, 2026
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To confirm, was there a regression or was this a new conformance test recently added?
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As we discussed in Slack, this is a regression due to the underlying pkcs7 library's defaults when we switched from |
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Summary
genTimerather than at the current wall-clock time, so that verification succeeds even after the TSA certificate has expiredVerifyOpts.CurrentTimeto allow callers to override the validation time explicitlyMotivation
Previously,
VerifyTimestampResponsevalidated the TSA certificate chain usingtime.Now()(Go's default whenx509.VerifyOptions.CurrentTimeis zero). This caused verification to fail once the TSA signing certificate expired, even though the timestamp was issued while the certificate was still valid.Per RFC 3161 Appendix B (steps B.4–B.5), the TSA certificate chain should be validated at the time the timestamp was issued (
genTime), not at the time of verification. A timestamp token remains valid as long as the TSA certificate was valid and unrevoked atgenTime.This change defaults
CurrentTimetots.Timewhen the caller does not specify one, aligning certificate chain validation with the RFC 3161 verification model.