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Jacob Appelbaum: attackers got certs for *.*.com and *.*.org (twitter.com/ioerror)
8 points by rw on Sept 4, 2011 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments


RFC2818 (the 'HTTP over TLS' specification) says that 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.

A careful reading of this wording does not seem to rule out the use of more than one wildcard, e.g. '*.*.com'. That's unfortunate. It likely depends on the particular browser's TLS implementation as to whether more than one wildcard in a name would be processed.


So would those certs be accepted by normal browsers? Couldn't the public suffix list be used to reject such overlay broad wildcards?




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