Odd/bad sentence in 5.4.1

We didn't get to it on today's call, and I'll forget before the
next one, but I don't like the following sentence:

"If certificate status checks are performed by a user agent, and a
certificate is found to be outside its validity period, then the
certificate MUST be considered revoked."

Revocation and validity periods aren't the same and I don't
see any reason to mix them up like this. For example, depending on
how a UA handled "considered revoked" the above could mean that a
cert that isn't yet valid will continue to be treated as revoked
even after the clock catches up with the notBefore field. That'd
be bad and non-compliant with x.509/rfc3280.

Plus, I really liked the relaxed validation which seems to have
disappeared (maybe at the last f2f?), and would be ruled out
by that sentence.

My suggestion: re-instate relaxed validation and delete the
above sentence.

S.

Received on Wednesday, 2 April 2008 16:38:37 UTC