At the time that RFC 2459 was written, URLs were the only things mature enough to include here. No one asked this question during the update to RFC 2459, which resulted in RFC 3280.
Going forward, I see two possible ways to go forward:1) Revisit the uri choice, and see if people think URNs ought to be permitted. One obvious question is to determine whether existing implementations would fail badly if a URN was received here.
2) Define a way to carry URNs in an other name. Russ At 07:25 PM 1/25/2007, Milan Sova wrote:
Hi.
In our project, we mark end entities with URNs and need to include
these names in the certificates. We started with using
subjectAltName.URI field for this (as URN is a "subtype" of URI).
However, this practice clashes with RFC 3280 which explicitly requires
absolute URL for the field.
Is there any specific reason for excluding URNs from subjectAltName?
Regards
--
Milan Sova