On Sun, Mar 15, 2026 at 10:01 PM Viktor Dukhovni <[email protected]>
wrote:

> On Sun, Mar 15, 2026 at 08:51:02PM -0700, Eric Rescorla wrote:
>
> > - If TLS 1.2 is negotiated, servers MUST NOT send
> >   certificates which are signed by or contain keys using
> >   these algorithms.
>
> This would I think be undesirable.  The details of which trust-anchors a
> TLS client or server supports, and which algorithms are accepted when
> verifying X.509 certificate chains are practically out of scope for TLS.
>

That's now that RFC 5246 (which controls TLS 1.2 says):

   If the client provided a "signature_algorithms" extension, then all
   certificates provided by the server MUST be signed by a
   hash/signature algorithm pair that appears in that extension.

This bullet is merely the logical consequence of that combined with
this code point not being meaningful for TLS 1.2.



>
> I am well aware of section 4.2.3 of RFC8446, the signature_algorithms"
> extension and the implicitly subsumed by it "signature_algorithms_cert".
> And yet, in practice, at least some TLS implementations treat the
> certificate chain as an opaque bag of bits to pass to the X.509 layer.
> They don't know or care what algorithms are employed there.  Only the EE
> key that signs CertificateVerity is directly examined by the TLS layer.
>

Those implementations are already potentially nonconformant.

-Ekr
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