Hi Sandy,

according to the OpenPGP Message Format RFC 
(https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4880), the signature creation time is in UTC.

3.5.  Time Fields

   A time field is an unsigned four-octet number containing the number
   of seconds elapsed since midnight, 1 January 1970 UTC.

5.2.3.4.  Signature Creation Time

   (4-octet time field)
   The time the signature was made.

Regards
Ed


> On 11 Feb 2019, at 19:29, Sandra Murphy <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> I’m surprised at the question.  I don’t know PGP/GPG all that well, but I 
> checked and the IETF standard for X-509 certificates (RFC5280) requires CAs 
> to use UTC in the signature time fields, and CMS (RFC5682) requires UTC in 
> the SigningTime (in both cases, up to the year 2049).  
> 
> Does this become an issue because the signatures in the RIPE database are 
> doing something different?
> 
> —Sandy
> 
> 
>> On Feb 11, 2019, at 11:41 AM, Edward Shryane via db-wg <[email protected]> 
>> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi Denis,
>> 
>>> On 11 Feb 2019, at 16:53, denis walker <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hi Ed
>>> 
>>> Thanks for following up on this. Just one question, have you taken into 
>>> account time zones? If an update is signed now in Dubai it is 19:51. If the 
>>> update is processed on Amsterdam time, it is 16:51. Will this update fail 
>>> because it is 3 hours in the future?
>>> 
>>> cheers
>>> denis
>>> co-chair DB-WG
>>> 
>> 
>> Good question. We rely on the Bouncy Castle cryptography library to provide 
>> the signing time for the message, and it does appear to take the timezone 
>> into account.
>> 
>> I tested by signing a message inside a virtual machine set to a different 
>> timezone (EST), and the signature creation time was correctly mapped to the 
>> local timezone (within a minute rather than hours).
>> 
>> The signed updates in production appear to confirm this - only 24 messages 
>> were more than 1 hour old, out of 118,183 (from October to December 2018), 
>> and none of these appeared to be offset by a multiple of hours.
>> 
>> Regards
>> Ed
>> 
> 


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