[caops-wg] [igtf-general] Re: Grid Certificate Profile version 0.20

[Jim Basney]

Mike 'Mike' Jones <mike.jones at manchester.ac.uk> wrote:
> On the subject of wild cards, a number of browsers support the use of the
> asterisks as wild cards in the CN field of a DNS style CN. e.g.
> *.google.com; does this document need a comment to this effect?

One reference for this behavior is Section 3.1 (Server Identity) of RFC
2818 (HTTP Over TLS).

   If a subjectAltName extension of type dNSName is present, that MUST
   be used as the identity. Otherwise, the (most specific) Common Name
   field in the Subject field of the certificate MUST be used. Although
   the use of the Common Name is existing practice, it is deprecated and
   Certification Authorities are encouraged to use the dNSName instead.

   Matching is performed using the matching rules specified by
   [RFC2459].  If more than one identity of a given type is present in
   the certificate (e.g., more than one dNSName name, a match in any one
   of the set is considered acceptable.) Names may contain the wildcard
   character * which is considered to match any single domain name
   component or component fragment. E.g., *.a.com matches foo.a.com but
   not bar.foo.a.com. f*.com matches foo.com but not bar.com.

-Jim