certs

func ValidateRoot ¶

func ValidateRoot(certStore trustmanager.X509Store, root *data.Signed, gun string) error

ValidateRoot receives a new root, validates its correctness and attempts to do root key rotation if needed.

First we list the current trusted certificates we have for a particular GUN. If that list is non-empty means that we've already seen this repository before, and have a list of trusted certificates for it. In this case, we use this list of certificates to attempt to validate this root file.

If the previous validation succeeds, or in the case where we found no trusted certificates for this particular GUN, we check the integrity of the root by making sure that it is validated by itself. This means that we will attempt to validate the root data with the certificates that are included in the root keys themselves.

If this last steps succeeds, we attempt to do root rotation, by ensuring that we only trust the certificates that are present in the new root.

This mechanism of operation is essentially Trust On First Use (TOFU): if we have never seen a certificate for a particular CN, we trust it. If later we see a different certificate for that certificate, we return an ErrValidationFailed error.

Note that since we only allow trust data to be downloaded over an HTTPS channel we are using the current public PKI to validate the first download of the certificate adding an extra layer of security over the normal (SSH style) trust model. We shall call this: TOFUS.