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Re: OpenLDAP and wildcard SSL certs
Brent J. Nordquist wrote:
As far as I know, CN should be the fully qualified domain
name. subjectAltName should have the wildcard.
But that defeats the whole purpose. Then you'd have to have one cert.
for each FQDN and then what's the point of using a wildcard at all?
Or am I misunderstanding what you're saying?
I should note that there was never a 2.1.32 OpenLDAP release, 2.1.30 was
the last. And since 2.1 is Historic and no longer supported, there's not
much point in pursuing this further until you upgrade to a supported
release (like 2.2.24). Likewise, OpenSSL 0.9.6b is ancient, and known to
have a number of security vulnerabilities. It is not a good idea to use
any of this old software. The wildcard features are known to work
correctly in recent releases.
As noted in the original message you referenced, RFC2459 does not permit
the use of wildcards in the subject DN of a cert. The specification only
allows wildcards to be used in the subjectAltName extension. Any
organizations and software packages supporting wildcards in the subject
DN are broken, and cannot be considered to have a reliable security
implementation.
SSL and certificates are not just some Magic Security Solution that can
be used arbitrarily without any thought. It is important to understand
exactly what these things are for. A certificate *certifies* that an
entity is exactly who it claims to be. As such, a certificate with a
wildcarded subject DN is pure nonsense - "hello, my name is <every
possible entity of Example.COM>". The use of wildcards in the
subjectAltName also have a very clear meaning. When presenting such a
cert, the entity is saying "Hello, my name is server1.example.com AND I
can accept requests on behalf of other servers in example.com." Again,
the point of a certificate is to uniquely and unambiguously identify
something, because you cannot make any conclusions about the integrity
of a transaction if you cannot unambiguously identify who you're
transacting with. Without such an assurance, there is no security, and
you may as well not bother using certificates at all.
--
-- Howard Chu
Chief Architect, Symas Corp. Director, Highland Sun
http://www.symas.com http://highlandsun.com/hyc
Symas: Premier OpenSource Development and Support