Rotate trust anchors without accepting unrelated authorities
Adding a new CA to the trust store accidentally imports every certificate from a shared bundle.
- Focused work estimate
- 3h 30m + prerequisites
- Priority in the scenario
- High
- Engineering practice
- Trust management
Estimated field mix
- Security70%
- Networking30%
Field percentages are editorial estimates of the ticket's engineering focus. They total 100%; they are not measured time, proficiency scores, or ownership evidence.
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Project context
A fictional internal report exporter uses mutual TLS. Certificates are renewed manually, and operators cannot distinguish peer identity failures from network outages.
Setup prerequisites
- Generate disposable test-only certificate authorities and leaf certificates for loopback services; use no production keys.
Preceding work
Complete these dependencies, or supply their agreed outputs before taking this ticket.
- BMTLS-101 · Define expected service names and certificate usage
- BMTLS-102 · Validate certificate chains without disabling hostname checks
- BMTLS-103 · Separate certificate expiry alerts from connection failure rates
- BMTLS-104 · Refresh connection pools after client-certificate rotation
- BMTLS-105 · Keep TLS errors from exposing peer secrets or request payloads
- BMTLS-106 · Rehearse leaf renewal under an unchanged trust anchor
Acceptance criteria
- Allowlist exact old and new test anchors.
- Stage verifier trust before switching issuers.
- Remove the old anchor after the declared overlap.
Implementation constraints
- Never trust an arbitrary system bundle for this private service boundary.
Verification to include
- Complete a staged CA rotation.
- Reject a third unrelated CA throughout the overlap.
Deliverables
- Trust-anchor rotation procedure.
Rollout and recovery
Keep overlap short and reviewed; fail closed on unexpected trust material.
Value of the work
For the engineer: Practice transport identity, trust-store changes, and certificate failure diagnosis.
For the team: Provide repeatable rotation and recovery behavior for authenticated service communication.
Evidence boundaries
Outcome Evidence: Tests, patches, and runbooks are requested deliverables. They become Outcome Evidence only through a qualified Mission and immutable Evidence IDs.
Ownership Evidence: Independent adaptation must be observed under a declared verification policy and cite immutable Evidence IDs. Completing a planning ticket establishes no Ownership Evidence.