letsencrypt / letsencrypt/boulder

One order can result in multiple certificates

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#3,428 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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area/ra kind/bug layer/rpc layer/storage
Dominant language
Go
Stars
5.8k
Forks
649
Avg merge
3d 23h
Merged PRs (30d)
24

Description

We rely on an UPDATE ... WHERE ... to guarantee a single certificate per order, but at our current level of query isolation, this doesn't actually guarantee a single unique certificate per order. We should figure out a plan to fix this.

Note: This would not result in multiple certificates with the same serial; one certificate would become "detached" from the order, but it would have a different serial.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by tracing the certificate creation path and the UPDATE ... WHERE operation described in the issue, then inspect the database transaction and query-isolation assumptions. Define a concurrency test that reproduces two certificates for one order and verify that the chosen fix preserves one unique certificate while allowing distinct serials.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
go, sql
Domain
backend, databases
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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