Re: ldap cert retrieval and pem encoding

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

Ulf Stegemann <ulf@zeitform.de> writes:

> XEmacs 21.4 (patch 17) "Jumbo Shrimp" [Lucid] (i686-pc-linux, Mule), 
> No Gnus v0.4
>
> The ldap server I use stores s/mime certificates either in DER or in PEM
> format.  smime-ldap retrieves only DER encoded certificates correctly.  PEM
> encoded certificates are fetched, too, but the resulting tmp file/buffer does
> not contain the correct cert only something that looks like a cert.
>
> Can anyone confirm this behaviour or is it a local problem?

The code assume the data returned is in DER form, so I think your
analysis is correct, and it is not a local problem.  The received,
assumed-DER, data is then base64 encoded, and wrapped into a PEM blob.
You should be able to base64 decode the tmp file/buffer content, and
get the certificate in PEM format.

I see two solutions:

The Right Thing: figure out how to get the type of data returned from
the server, and follow that hint.

The Workaround: Look at the received data to see if the head happen to
match a PEM header, and decide based on that.

It might be that the two solutions collapse into one if the server
can't return the type of data in any other way of having a PEM header
on the blob, though.