On Thu, Apr 7, 2016 at 4:32 PM, Rick Andrews <[email protected]> wrote:
> Section 4.2 in 6962-bis says:
> When a precertificate contains that extension and contains a CN-ID
>    [RFC6125], the CN-ID MUST match the first DNS-ID and have the same
>    labels redacted.  TLS clients will use the first entry in the
>    SEQUENCE OF INTEGERs to reconstruct both the first DNS-ID and the CN-
>    ID.
>
> I'm aware of a problem (confirmed by Peter Bowen at Amazon) with Java7 and
> Java8 where getting a new certificate with a different SAN ordering from the
> previous one will prevent those Java clients from successfully validating
> the new certificate, at least until the cache in the client expires the old
> cert information. In most cases, we put the CN-ID in the first SAN field,
> but there are exceptions made in cases like this.
>
> I think the spec used to say that the first item in the SEQUENCE represented
> the CN-ID, and I missed the discussion where that changed.

More than just working around bugs in Java, there are names that can
be placed in a dNSName entry that cannot be commonName value due to
length.  According to RFC5280, commonName has an upper bound of 64
total characters while dNSNames have a bound of 63 characters per
label and a total length limit in excess of 200 characters.  Therefore
a CA may not be able to place the first DNS-ID in the CN-ID field.

I also wonder how to handle multiple CN-IDs in a single certificate.
There is not, to my knowledge, a requirement that the Subject only
contain one attribute of type commonName.

Thanks,
Peter

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