Re: DN Encoding by UTF8String

[Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker <levitte@xxxxx>]

In message <200312120952.hBC9qkv20566@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> on Fri, 12 Dec 2003 22:52:46 +1300, pgut001@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Peter Gutmann) said:

pgut001> (and then there's the all-important 0.000001% of the user
pgut001> base still using Netscape 4.x, which will crash if it hits a
pgut001> UTF-8 string).

Personally, I'd say that's the perfect reason to use UTF-8.
Supporting Netscape 4 has become HARD lately (and that's a discussion
for a completely different forum).

pgut001> It's like the IPv6 upgrade, the first backbone provider to
pgut001> switch to it is going to trigger every IPv6 bug in every
pgut001> implementation every created, so no-one wants to be the
pgut001> guinea pig.

*ahem* Actually, it's happening as we speak.  KTH (The Royal Institute
of Technology in Stockholm) and SUNET (Swedish University NETwork,
which also holds much of the swedish Internet infrastructure) are
going IPv6 native (I think they're almost done).  So if there are bugs
to be triggered, now is the time :-).

pgut001> What we'd really need here is an indication from vendors of
pgut001> how far UTF-8 support goes (or doesn't go) in their products,
pgut001> to determine whether it's safe to switch it on yet.  The most
pgut001> important one would be Microsoft I guess.  I'll start the
pgut001> ball rolling by saying that any version of cryptlib that
pgut001> handles certs will process UTF-8, although none will produce
pgut001> it (at least in a DN) for the reason given above.

OpenSSL handles UTF-8 fine (at least last I checked), and can produce
UTF-8 DNs as well (it's all part of the configuration file).

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