certificate identifiers

[curmudgeon]

I did search for this (obviously not well enough), as well as read a couple of Gentoo wiki articles.

With app-misc/ca-certificates, the certificates themselves get stored in /usr/share/ca-certificates/mozilla/, with /etc/ssl/certs/ having TWO links that (ultimately) point to each certificate. I obviously understand the link containing the name of the certificate itself, but where does the four-byte (eight hexadecimal digits) identifier come from? I can't find it inside of the certificate itself.

For example:

Code: Select all

$ ls -al /etc/ssl/certs/ | grep cacert
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root     21 2024-03-15 11:31:55 590d426f.0 -> cacert.org_class3.pem
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root     21 2024-03-15 11:31:55 99d0fa06.0 -> cacert.org_class1.pem
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root     67 2024-03-15 11:31:53 cacert.org_class1.pem -> ../../../usr/share/ca-certificates/cacert.org/cacert.org_class1.crt
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root     67 2024-03-15 11:31:53 cacert.org_class3.pem -> ../../../usr/share/ca-certificates/cacert.org/cacert.org_class3.crt

In this case, what creates the identifiers 590d426f and 99d0fa06?

Thank you in advance.

[hdcg]

Hi curmudgeon,

these are hash values of the linked certificates and are used for fast lookups.
They are created by the c_rehash script.

Best Regards,
Holger