Wandering Thoughts archives

2017-04-10

How TLS certificates specify the hosts they're for

Any TLS-like system of public key cryptography plus Certificate Authorities that vouch for your identity needs a format for certificates. When Netscape came up with the very first version of SSL, they opted not to invent a certificate format to go with their new encryption protocol; instead they reused the certificate format that had already been proposed for email in 1993 in RFC 1422 (as part of PEM). This foundational work didn't define its own certificate format either; instead it opted to politely reuse an existing specification, X.509, which associated with the X.500 directory specification, which was as a broad whole intended to be part of the OSI network stack before OSI as a whole was completely run over by the Internet TCP/IP juggernaut. This reuse in PEM was apparently intended in part to help interoperability with X.500/X.509 based email systems that more or less never materialized.

(The Internet used to worry a great deal about talking to foreign email systems and how to map between SMTP email concepts and those systems.)

A standard part of X.509 certificates is their Subject name, ie what the certificate is about. X.509 subject names are not freeform text; instead they are a set of attributes making up an X.500 Distinguished Name. Since these attributes come from an OSI directory specification, they're focused on identifying people in some role, as you can see from the list of standard DN keys in RFC 1779. This presented Netscape with a little problem, namely how to use a certificate to identify an Internet host instead of a person. So back in 1995 and 1996 when SSL v2 and v3 were specified, people took the obvious way out. X.500 DNs have a field called the CN, or Common Name, which for people is your name. For host certificates, the CN field was reused as the hostname (with the other DN fields being used to identify the organization officially associated with the certificate and so on).

In the beginning this was fine. However, as SSL went on people started wanting to have more than one hostname associated with a single SSL certificate; if nothing else, people liked having both www.<domain> and plain <domain>. This is a problem because the CN only contained a single hostname. Fortunately X.509 certificates can contain extensions, and so by no later than RFC 2459 (which went with TLS 1.0) there was the Subject Alternative Name extension. A SubjectAltName was explicitly a sequence of things (including DNS hostnames), so you could put multiple hostnames in it.

Then things get complicated. As of RFC 3280 in 2002, including SANs in TLS certificates was theoretically mandatory (via), and in fact using a CN was deprecated in RFC 2818 in 2000. How SANs and the CN interacts depends on the software involved; per this Stackoverflow answer, RFC 5280 in 2008 said to look at both, while RFC 6125 in 2011 theoretically mandated checking SANs only if they were present (and they should always be present). See also this SO answer for more information about the CA/Browser Forum Baseline Requirements view on this, and there's also the discussion in this Let's Encrypt issue.

Given that there is plenty of pre-2011 software out there on the Internet, you can in practice find TLS certificates with all variants of this; with a CN only, with SANs only, with SANs and a CN that contains one of the SAN's names, and with SANs that do not contain the certificate's CN. With the widespread prevalence of multiple hostnames in SANs in certificates (sometimes a very long list of them, eg on Cloudflare's web servers), all even vaguely modern TLS software can validate certificates using only SAN names. I don't know if there's any browser or TLS software yet that ignores the CN or actively requires certificates to have a SAN, but it's probably not too far off; at this point, it's likely to be at least a little bit unsafe to use TLS certificates without a SAN.

(You probably can't get CA signed certificates without a SubjectAltName, because the CA will add them for you whether or not you like it. Self-signed certificates are a different matter entirely, but that's another entry.)

TLSCertificatesNamingHosts written at 21:55:09; Add Comment


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