On 01/04/2021 16:21, Michael Wojcik
wrote:
Thanks to everyone who responded. You've confirmed my impression: - There doesn't appear to be any applicable standard which requires or forbids including the root, or even endorses or discourages it).
rfc8446 page 65:
.... The sender's certificate MUST come in the first CertificateEntry in the list. Each following certificate SHOULD directly certify the one immediately preceding it. Because certificate validation requires that trust anchors be distributed independently, a certificate that specifies a trust anchor MAY be omitted from the chain, provided that supported peers are known to possess any omitted certificates. Note: Prior to TLS 1.3, "certificate_list" ordering required each certificate to certify the one immediately preceding it; however, some implementations allowed some flexibility. Servers sometimes send both a current and deprecated intermediate for transitional purposes, and others are simply configured incorrectly, but these cases can nonetheless be validated properly. For maximum compatibility, all implementations SHOULD be prepared to handle potentially extraneous certificates and arbitrary orderings from any TLS version, with the exception of the end-entity certificate which MUST be first.