Re: WebID equivalence

On 3 Jan 2012, at 14:06, Kingsley Idehen wrote:

> On 1/3/12 7:22 AM, Henry Story wrote:
>>> What is an important point to consider re. WebID is what should be done when the CN contains URLs?
>> A Common Name is not meant to be a URL so there is nothing to do there, unless you want to do screen scraping or detective work.
> 
> So you are claiming this is wrong then?
> 
> Subject: C=US, ST=Maryland, L=Pasadena, O=Brent Baccala,
>                 OU=FreeSoft,CN=www.freesoft.org/emailAddress=baccala@freesoft.org


CN=www.freesoft.org is not a CN containing a URL, for a start. A CN is effectively arbitrary, will often be used for matching (cf. clients comparing SSL server hostnames).

(You could add a URI as a DN attribute, though, if you know the signing entity will accept it — just pick or define an appropriate attribute OID).

Whether *parts* of a DN should trigger special processing on the part of a receiver is a different matter. I can't recall what ITU recs have to say on the subject. I do know that a number of free personal certificate issuers mandate that the CN is a fixed string.

M.

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Received on Tuesday, 3 January 2012 14:29:12 UTC