Migration

Every X.509 certificate, every CRL, every OCSP response, every CSR is encoded in ASN.1 DER. If you are building PKI software in Rust, ASN.1 encoding and decoding is the foundation everything else rests on. Get it wrong, and certificates parse incorrectly. Get it slow, and your CA cannot keep up with issuance. Get it fragmented across multiple libraries, and you spend more time managing dependencies than building features. PKI.Next was using six ASN.1 crates simultaneously. We replaced all of them with synta in a single commit. This post explains why, how, and what we gained. ...

Dogtag PKI has been Red Hat’s Certificate Authority since 2005. It started as Netscape Certificate Management System, became Red Hat Certificate System, was open-sourced as Dogtag, and is now the CA backend for FreeIPA — Red Hat’s identity management platform that manages certificates, Kerberos, DNS, and SUDO for enterprise Linux environments. Dogtag works. It has passed Common Criteria evaluations. It runs in government agencies, financial institutions, and large enterprises. It has issued millions of certificates in production. ...