Question

I have an X.509 certificate which has the following 2 timestamps:

['validFrom'] = String(13) "120314165227Z"
['validTo']   = String(13) "130314165227Z"

What does the postfix character ‘Z’ mean. Does it specify the timezone?

Answer 1

Yes. ‘Z’ stands for Zulu time, which is also GMT and UTC.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time:

The UTC time zone is sometimes denoted by the letter Z—a reference to
the equivalent nautical time zone (GMT), which has been denoted by a Z
since about 1950. The letter also refers to the “zone description” of
zero hours, which has been used since 1920 (see time zone history).
Since the NATO phonetic alphabet and amateur radio word for Z is
“Zulu”, UTC is sometimes known as Zulu time.

Technically, because the definition of nautical time zones is based on longitudinal position, the Z time is not exactly identical to the actual GMT time ‘zone’. However, since it is primarily used as a reference time, it doesn’t matter what area of Earth it applies to as long as everyone uses the same reference.

From wikipedia again, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautical_time:

Around 1950, a letter suffix was added to the zone description,
assigning Z to the zero zone, and A–M (except J) to the east and N–Y
to the west (J may be assigned to local time in non-nautical
applications; zones M and Y have the same clock time but differ by 24
hours: a full day). These were to be vocalized using a phonetic
alphabet which pronounces the letter Z as Zulu, leading sometimes to
the use of the term “Zulu Time”. The Greenwich time zone runs from
7.5°W to 7.5°E longitude, while zone A runs from 7.5°E to 22.5°E longitude, etc.