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Re: [certid] open issue: wildcards in component fragments

Peter Saint-Andre <stpeter@stpeter.im> Wed, 13 October 2010 00:33 UTC

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Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2010 18:34:54 -0600
From: Peter Saint-Andre <stpeter@stpeter.im>
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Subject: Re: [certid] open issue: wildcards in component fragments
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On 10/12/10 5:51 PM, Matt McCutchen wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-10-13 at 01:34 +0200, Martin Rex wrote:
>> I consider the conservative approach of MSIE/SChannel and Firefox to
>> allow a tail wildcard on the leftmost DNS label, in addition to a
>> full wildcard, sensitive risk management combined with minimal complexity.
> 
> As I said before, I don't think this "risk management" argument is real.
> CAs are responsible for not giving an entity a certificate that matches
> names the entity does not own.  Why should we believe they are any more
> likely to mess up via wildcards than, e.g., by setting the basic
> constraint "CA: true"?

Matt, what conclusion do you draw from your statement? IMHO it might
lead to the conclusion that it doesn't matter what we put in the
left-most label -- or even the conclusion that we don't need to restrict
the location of the wildcard (e.g., foo.*.example.com or even
*.*.example.com is fine) -- as long as the CA issues a certificate that
matches a name the entity owns.

Peter

-- 
Peter Saint-Andre
https://stpeter.im/

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