On Tue, 2021-01-26 at 18:43 +0000, Jacob Champion wrote:
> On Tue, 2021-01-26 at 13:49 +0100, Daniel Gustafsson wrote:
> > The OpenSSL X509_NAME_cmp function use RFC 5280 section 7.1 and RFC 4517
> > section 4.2.15 (which in turn reference RFC 4514 for the DN string format).
> > libnss has CERT_AsciiToName which is referencing RFCs 1485, 1779 and 2253 in
> > lib/certdb/alg1485.c. Comparing the two would be interesting.
>
> Yeah. I'll poke around a bit.
Here's some output from a test program I threw together, which parses
identical DER using OpenSSL and NSS and writes the corresponding string
representation.
> input/basic.conf:
> ssl: CN=pchampion,OU=VMware
> nss: CN=pchampion,OU=VMware
>
> input/escape.conf:
> ssl: CN=\,\+\\\;\"\<\>
> nss: CN=",+\\;\"<>"
>
> input/multivalue.conf:
> ssl: CN=pchampion+SN=Champion+GN=Jacob,OU=VMware
> nss: givenName=Jacob+SN=Champion+CN=pchampion,OU=VMware
>
> input/unicode.conf:
> ssl: CN=οδυσσέας,OU=VMware
> nss: CN=οδυσσέας,OU=VMware
>
> input/unprintable.conf:
> ssl: CN=\01\,\02\,\03,OU=\01\02\03
> nss: CN="\01,\02,\03",OU=\01\02\03
basic.conf is exactly what it looks like: CN=pchampion,OU=VMware. Both
implementations agree.
escape.conf contains a CN with the literal value
,+\;"<>
and you can see that NSS doesn't follow RFC 4514 here; it uses the
older double-quoting form of escaping. There's a 15-year-old bug on
this in NSS [1].
multivalue.conf contains a multivalued AVA with commonName "pchampion",
givenName "Jacob", and surname "Champion". They aren't sorted in the
same order, and the implementations even disagree on how to represent
the givenName attribute. (I'm not convinced that either choice is RFC-
4514-compliant; it doesn't look like GN is registered with IANA as a
short name for givenName.)
unicode.conf contains a commonName of "οδυσσέας". Both implementations
agree, but the only way I was able to get OpenSSL to produce this
(rather than a string of escaped hex) was by using the flags
XN_FLAG_RFC2253 & ~ASN1_STRFLGS_ESC_MSB
in the call to X509_NAME_print_ex(). This should work fine for a
database encoding of UTF-8, but would we need to convert for other
encodings? Also, I'm not sure how this would handle certificates that
aren't UTF-8 encoded. It looks like some UCS variants are legal?
unprintable.conf contains the bytes 0x01, 0x02, and 0x03 in the
commonName and organizationalUnit. They're backslash-escaped by both
implementations, but if you add any other printable escaped characters
(such as comma, in the CN example here) NSS will still double-quote the
whole thing.
--Jacob
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=355096
