hyperledger/fabric · error

marshalling of the certificate failed

Error message

marshalling of the certificate failed

What it means

sanitizeECDSASignedCert: after replacing the ECDSA signature value with the low-S variant, re-encoding the modified certificate structure with encoding/asn1.Marshal failed; the wrapped error describes the ASN.1 encoding failure.

Source

Thrown at msp/cert.go:111

	// otherwise create a new certificate with the new signature

	// 1. Unmarshal cert.Raw to get an instance of certificate,
	//    the lower level interface that represent an x509 certificate
	//    encoding
	var newCert certificate
	newCert, err = certFromX509Cert(cert)
	if err != nil {
		return nil, err
	}

	// 2. Change the signature
	newCert.SignatureValue = asn1.BitString{Bytes: expectedSig, BitLength: len(expectedSig) * 8}
	newCert.Raw = nil

	// 3. marshal again newCert. Raw must be nil
	newRaw, err := asn1.Marshal(newCert)
	if err != nil {
		return nil, errors.Wrap(err, "marshalling of the certificate failed")
	}

	// 4. parse newRaw to get an x509 certificate
	return x509.ParseCertificate(newRaw)
}

func certFromX509Cert(cert *x509.Certificate) (certificate, error) {
	var newCert certificate
	_, err := asn1.Unmarshal(cert.Raw, &newCert)
	if err != nil {
		return certificate{}, errors.Wrap(err, "unmarshalling of the certificate failed")
	}
	return newCert, nil
}

// String returns a PEM representation of a certificate
func (c certificate) String() string {
	b, err := asn1.Marshal(c)

View on GitHub (pinned to 2736b63f8f)

Solutions

1. Inspect the wrapped asn1 error for the offending field
2. Verify the certificate is well-formed before sanitization
3. Report upstream if a valid cert cannot be re-marshalled

When it happens

Trigger: Thrown at msp/cert.go:111 when the library encounters an invalid state.

Common situations: See trigger scenarios.

Understand the failure class

• SSL/TLS and certificate errors — how TLS handshakes and certificate validation fail.

AI-assisted analysis of hyperledger/fabric@2736b63f8f (2026-09-04). Data as JSON: /api/errors/80286896cdf91d37. Report an issue: GitHub.