In-depth validation of certificates

[Luciano Mammino]

Right now the library only validates a certificate based ONLY on the status of the signature. In reality a certificate can be considered invalid even if the signature is validated correctly.

As far as I understand there are several other factors that we should support in terms of validation:

• Signature validity: already supported ✅
• Certificate emission time and expiry time. The DgcContainer struct already collects these timestamps but we offer no easy way to check the current time against them.
• Business Rules (or country-specific rules): see #19 for dedicated issue.

In the context of this issue I think it will important to figure out an ergonomic API that:

1. should make it easy to validate the certificate in one single operation (function call)
2. Return the certificate data (if we can parse that correctly)
3. Return a clear error in case of validation failed (for instance it's very important to distinguish whether a certificate is expired or whether it doesn't satisfy a specific regional rule)

Maybe we could have a dedicated CertificateValidity struct that can contain various fields like this:

pub struct CertificateValidity {
  signature: SignatureValidity,
  time: TimeValidity,
  business_rules: BusinessRulesValidity
}

SignatureValidity, TimeValidity and BusinessRulesValidity could be enums that can encapsulate all the different state of validation that is relevant for them. For instance:

pub enum TimeValidity {
  Valid,
  NotValidYet,
  Expired
}

Finally we could have a is_valid() method on the CertificateValidity struct that simply returns true or false if all the conditions are satisfied or not...

[Tommaso Allevi]

For my point of view validate function should throw (aka return a Result::Err) when some validations fail.
If you need to know also the info, we can split the "parse" and the "validation" phase into 2 function call. Something like

let cwt: Cwt = decode_cwt(data).unwrap();
match cwt.validate() {
  Ok(_) => { },
  Err(err) => { .... },
}

As shortcut

fn validate(data: &str) -> Result<(), ValidationError> {
  let cwt: Cwt = decode_cwt(data).unwrap(); // this error could be transformed into a ValidationError using a dedicated variant
  cwt.validate()
}

[Riccardo Ripanti]

Regarding this problem I've seen that CwtHeader has kid and alg declared as Options but it seems to me that if any of those information are missing it should be considered an error.

From the European Commission

3.2 Structure of the payload

[...]

The integrity and authenticity of origin of payload data MUST be verifiable by the Verifier. To
provide this mechanism, the issuer of MUST sign the CWT using an asymmetric electronic
signature scheme as defined in the COSE specification (RFC 8152).

---

For the parsing and verification I agree with @allevo that they should be in two separate functions.

I would also add that given that the decode_cwt function returns a Cwt should be declared as a static method of the Cwt struct. This counts also for validate which directly interactes with its data.

I my mind, one should be able to write Cwt::decode(data)?.verify(trust_list) == SignatureValidity::Valid

Also it might be a good idea to rename the Cwt struct as we are not parsing a generic CWT but a specific one that contains an HCERT.

EDIT: I missed the discussion on #8, I'll talk about this last part over there