How you get multiple TLS certificate chains from a server certificate

July 4, 2020

I've known and read for some time that a single server certificate can have more than one chain to a root certificate that you trust, but I never really thought about the details of how this worked. Then the AddTrust thing happened, I started writing about how Prometheus's TLS checks would have reacted to it, and Guus left a comment on that entry that got me thinking about what else Prometheus could sensibly look at here. So now I want to walk through the mechanics of multiple TLS chains to get this straight in my head.

Your server certificate and the other TLS certificates in a chain are each signed by an issuer; in a verified chain, this chain of issuers eventually reaches a Certificate Authority root certificate that people have some inherent trust in. However, a signed certificate doesn't specifically name and identify the issuer's certificate by, say, its serial number or hash; instead issuers are identified by their X.509 Subject Name and also at least implicitly by their keypair (and sometimes explicitly). By extension, your signed certificate also identifies the key type of the issuer's certificate; if your server certificate is signed by RSA, an intermediate certificate with an ECDSA keypair is clearly not the correct parent certificate.

(Your server certificate implicitly identifies the issuer by keypair because they signed your certificate with it; an intermediate certificate with a different keypair can never validate the signature on your certificate.)

However, several certificates can have the same keypair and X.509 Subject Name, provided that other attributes differ. One such attribute is the issuer that signed them (including whether this is a self-signed CA root certificate). So the first thing is that having more than one certificate for an issuer is generally required to get multiple chains. If you only have one certificate for each issuer, you can pretty much only build a single chain.

There are three places that these additional certificates for an issuer can come from; they can be sent by the server, they can be built into your certificate store in advance, or they can be cached because you saw them in some other context. The last is especially common with browsers, which often cache intermediate certificates that they see and may use them in preference to the intermediate certificate that a TLS server sends. Other software is generally more static about what it will use. My guess is that we're unlikely to have multiple certificates for a single CA root issuer, at least for modern CAs and modern root certificate sets as used by browsers and so on. This implies that the most likely place to get additional issuer certificates is from intermediate certificates sent by a server.

(In any case, it's fairly difficult to know what root certificate sets clients are using when they talk to your server. If your server sends the CA root certificate you think should be used as part of the certificate chain, a monitoring client (such as Prometheus's checks) can at most detect when it's got an additional certificate for that CA root issuer in its own local trust store.)

One cause of additional issuer certificates is what's called cross-signing a CA's intermediate certificate, as is currently the case with Let's Encrypt's certificates. In cross-signing, a CA generate two versions of its intermediate certificate, using the same X.509 Subject Name and keypair; one is signed by its own CA root certificate and one is signed by another CA root certificate. A CA can also cross-sign its own new root certificate (well, the keypair and issuer) directly, as is the case with the DST Root CA X3 certificate that Let's Encrypt is currently cross-signed with; one certificate for 'DST Root CA X3' is self-signed and likely in your root certificate set, but two others existed that were cross-signed by an older DST CA root certificate.

(As covered in the certificate chain illustrations in Fixing the Breakage from the AddTrust External CA Root Expiration, this was also the case with the expiring AddTrust root CA certificate. The 'USERTrust RSA Certification Authority' issuer was also cross-signed to 'AddTrust External CA Root', a CA root certificate that expired along with that cross-signed intermediate certificate. And this USERTrust root issuer is still cross signed to another valid root certificate, 'AAA Certificate Services'.)

This gives us some cases for additional issuer certificates:

  • your server's provided chain includes multiple intermediate certificates for the same issuer, for example both Let's Encrypt intermediate certificates. A client can build one certificate chain through each.

  • your server provides an additional cross-signed CA certificate, such as the USERTrust certificate signed by AddTrust. A client can build one certificate chain that stops at the issuer certificate that's in its root CA set, or it can build another chain that's longer, using your extra cross-signed intermediate certificate.

  • the user's browser knows about additional intermediate certificates and will build additional chains using them, even though your server doesn't provide them in its set of certificates. This definitely happens, but browsers are also good about handling multiple chains.

In a good world, all intermediate certificates will have an expiration time no later than the best certificate for the issuer that signed them. This was the case with the AddTrust expiration; the cross-signed USERTrust certificate expired at the same time as the AddTrust root certificate. In this case you can detect the problem by noticing that a server provided intermediate certificate is expiring soon. If only a CA root certificate at the end of an older chain is expiring soon and the intermediate certificate signed by it has a later expiration date, you need to check the expiration time of the entire chain.

As a practical matter, monitoring the expiry time of all certificates provided by a TLS server seems very likely to be enough to detect multiple chain problems such as the AddTrust issue. Competent Certificate Authorities shouldn't issue server or intermediate certificates with expiry times later than their root (or intermediate) certificates, so we don't need to try to find and explicitly check those root certificates. This will also alert on expiring certificates that were provided but that can't be used to construct any chain, but you probably want to get rid of those anyway.

Sidebar: Let's Encrypt certificate chains in practice

Because browsers do their own thing, a browser may construct multiple certificate chains for Let's Encrypt certificates today even if your server only provides the LE intermediate certificate that is signed by DST Root CA X3 (the current Let's Encrypt default for the intermediate certificate). For example, if you visit Let's Encrypt's test site for their own CA root, your browser will probably cache the LE intermediate certificate that chains to the LE CA root certificate, and then visiting other sites using Let's Encrypt may cause your browser to ignore their intermediate certificate and chain through the 'better' one it already has cached. This is what currently happens for me on Firefox.

Written on 04 July 2020.
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Last modified: Sat Jul 4 16:03:00 2020
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