Subject: Date fields

From: "Jacques Exelrud" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 31 Mar 2001 13:54:32 -0300

Recently I was faced with a strange behavior of one of my keys.
 One of the subkeys was showing the start date of 1/1/2002 and the
 end date of 31/12/2002 in some machines and 31/12/2001 for starting
 date and 30/21/2002 for ending date in some other machines. 
    Seems the problem is related to DST as the date is interpreted as
localtime and based on wht if those date fall inside DST periods in
some countries and if the computer is configured to take this into
account or not.
    Ate least the third subkey does behave this way on my machine. If
I turn DST handling on or off the dates do change.
    What is still not clear is why just one of the subkeys behaves
this way and the other two seems imune to that funtinality.

    In my opinion, this may lead to some problems.

    For split-keys (hope that's a OpenPGP feature and not just a PGP
feature, have not checked the rfc) it may happen that parts of this
key be located in different parts of the worl so some group of key
holders may be able to still use the key while others may not.

    For non split-keys the problem may not be as serious. What may
happen is that the user may receive an encrypted message with the
about to expire subkey while he is waiting to receive the message
encrypted to the new subkey. At first sign this does not lead to any
security/legal problem. At most the lack of certain on the date the
message was generated because there is a one day lag the the key have
geographic locations able to use it and some that are not.

    Are those problems worth the change of the date fields from
localtime to UTC ?

    Thanks in advance,
    Jacques