- From: Konrad Lanz <Konrad.Lanz@iaik.tugraz.at>
- Date: Thu, 24 May 2007 04:05:23 +0200
- To: public-xmlsec-maintwg@w3.org
- Message-ID: <4654F2E3.7090009@iaik.tugraz.at>
Dear all,
having taken a closer look at section 4.4.4
<http://www.w3.org/2007/xmlsec/Drafts/xmldsig-core/#sec-X509Data> and at
E01 <http://www.w3.org/2001/10/xmldsig-errata#E01> as well as Gregors
Mail
<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-ietf-xmldsig/2002JanMar/0112.html>
I think 4.4.4 actually need more attention than we thought ...
-------------------------------------------------
4.4.4 The |X509Data| Element
Identifier
|Type="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#X509Data
<http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#SPKIData>| "
(this can be used within a |RetrievalMethod| or |Reference| element
to identify the referent's type)
An |X509Data| element within |KeyInfo| contains one or more identifiers
of keys or X509 certificates (or certificates' identifiers or a
revocation list). The content of |X509Data| is:
1. At least one element, from the following set of element types; any
of these may appear together or more than once iff (if and only
if) each instance describes or is related to the same certificate:
2.
* The |X509IssuerSerial| element, which contains an X.509
issuer distinguished name/serial number pair. The X.509
issuer distinguished name SHOULD be compliant with the DNAME
encoding rules at the end of this section and the serial
number is represented as a decimal integer,
* The |X509SubjectName| element, which contains an X.509
subject distinguished name that SHOULD be compliant with the
DNAME encoding rules at the end of this section,
* The |X509SKI| element, which contains the base64 encoded
plain (i.e. non-DER-encoded) value of a X509 V.3
SubjectKeyIdentifier extension.
* The |X509Certificate| element, which contains a
base64-encoded [X509v3
<http://www.w3.org/TR/xmldsig-core/#ref-X509v3>]
certificate, and
* Elements from an external namespace which
accompanies/complements any of the elements above.
* The |X509CRL| element, which contains a base64-encoded
certificate revocation list (CRL) [X509v3
<http://www.w3.org/TR/xmldsig-core/#ref-X509v3>].
-------------------------------------------------
Please consider now the following DName as a challenging test case
CN: Rick + Fred, III
O: ÄËÏÖÜ \ Rick & Fred <devices>;
OU: #ING
C: AT
now let's make it RFC2253 compliant
CN=Rick \+ Fred\, III, O=ÄËÏÖÜ \\ Rick & Fred \<devices\>\;, OU=\#ING, C=AT
and now lets put it into the X509IssuerName
<X509IssuerName>CN=Rick \+ Fred\, III, O=ÄËÏÖÜ \\ Rick & Fred \<devices\>\;, OU=\#ING, C=AT</X509IssuerName>
and a document contining this X509IssuerName is not well formed any more
... --> Which is really bad
So we can either put it into a CDATA section or escape the "<" by
"\<" and "&" by "&" showing that there is actually a need to
change the so called "DNAME encoding rules at the end of this section".
We'll also have to require applications to do the inverse operation ...
"\<" --> "\<" and "&" --> &
-------------------------------------------------
Strings in DNames (appearing in X509IssuerName, |X509SubjectName|, and
|KeyName| if approriate) should be encoded as follows:
* Consider the string as consisting of Unicode characters.
* Escape occurrences of the following special characters by
prefixing it with the "\" character:
o a "#" character occurring at the beginning of the string
o one of the characters ",", "+", """, "\", ">", ";" or "<".
The latter "<" also MUST be effectively escaped to "\<"
"&" to keep well-formedness.
* "&" MUST be scaped to "&" to keep well-formedness.
* Escape all occurrences of ASCII control characters (Unicode range
\x00 - \x1f) by replacing them with "\" followed by a two digit
hex number showing its Unicode number.
* Escape any trailing white space by replacing "\ " with "\20".
* Since a XML document logically consists of characters, not octets,
the resulting Unicode string is finally encoded according to the
character encoding used for producing the physical representation
of the XML document.
As soon as one of these DNames is used (i.e. passed to another software
component)
the application MUST convert "\<" to "\<" and "&" to "&" .
-------------------------------------------------
For future work we should also note there is a successor to RFC 2253. It
is RFC 4515 and this one should be referred to in future versions.
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2253
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4514
regards
Konrad
P.S: I think, most implementations based on DOM should actually behave
in this manner already.
--
Konrad Lanz, IAIK/SIC - Graz University of Technology
Inffeldgasse 16a, 8010 Graz, Austria
Tel: +43 316 873 5547
Fax: +43 316 873 5520
https://www.iaik.tugraz.at/aboutus/people/lanz
http://jce.iaik.tugraz.at
Certificate chain (including the EuroPKI root certificate):
https://europki.iaik.at/ca/europki-at/cert_download.htm
Received on Thursday, 24 May 2007 02:05:49 UTC