RSA Authenticator Utility does not import digital certificate which has an expiration date of 2/3/2106

3 years ago

Originally Published: 2006-01-09

Article Number

000061315

Applies To

RSA Authenticator Utility (RAU) 1.0
Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP2
RSA SecurID SID800 Authenticator
RSA BSAFE Cert-C

Issue

RSA Authenticator Utility does not import digital certificate which has an expiration date of 2/3/2106

Cause

The problem is with RSA BSAFE Cert-C and the certificate having an expiration date of the year 2105. Cert-C uses UINT4 (unsigned 4 byte integer) types to store date and time values represented as seconds since January 1, 1970 00:00 UTC. The valid input range is from 0 which yields January 1, 1970 00:00 UTC to 4294967295 which yields February 6, 2106 06:28:15 UTC.

Many of the standards implemented by Cert-C specify that GeneralizedTime can be used, which allows for dates beyond those that are able to be stored in a UINT4. Thus, Cert-C suffers from the Year 2106 problem by design.

Another issue is that, when ASN.1 parsing certificates, Cert-C currently does not allow full use of the possible date and time range. There is a Year 2099 limit hard-coded.

Resolution

RSA Security hopes to resolve this issue in a future update to RSA BSAFE Cert-C that will then be used for future version of RSA Authenticator Utility (RAU) and other RSA products. So until then, the digital certificate cannot have an expiration date beyond 2099.

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