Re: Ncat Wildcard Matching rules

[David Fifield <david () bamsoftware com>]

On Sat, Jun 13, 2009 at 02:35:54PM +0530, venkat sanaka wrote:
> I have been working on to add wildcard matching support
> for ncat so that it can accept wildcard ssl certificates aswell.
> But i have a problem in implementation of matching rules
> as there are different RFCs (like RFC 2595,RFC 2818,RFC 4513)
> saying different matching rules.
>
> Moreover the browsers and other ssl clients also had their own
> wildcard matching rules without following any of the RFCs.
>
> The slide No.5 of this presentation explains these differences
> in wildcard matching rules very briefly.
> https://www.switch.ch/pki/meetings/2007-01/namebased_ssl_virtualhosts.pdf

I have two proposals:

1. Don't do any wildcard matching at all, which is what we do now.
2. Follow the most restrictive subset of the rules in the various RFCs.
   This means that you only get one *, and it has to be the leftmost
   name. So *.example.com is good but *.*.example.com and a.*.com are
   not. *.example com would match a.example.com but not a.b.example.com
   and not example.com. The RFC 2818 example of f*.com is a mistake. I
   think we should add the additional restriction that there have to be
   at least two elements to the right of the *, so that * and *.com are
   invalid.

How common are these wildcard certificates in practice? Does anybody run
an SSL site with one of them?

> We decided to find out first how common is the usage
> of wildcard certifiates and thereby either leaving this completely
> or making it a low priority if there aren't many.For this we thought
> of having a SSL certificate retrieval NSE script which scans
> 10,000 SSL web servers and see what they have in their certificates.

An NSE script to retrieve server certificates would be cool, and not
hard technically. That would allow us to get some real numbers.

David Fifield

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