[gnutls-devel] Mandatory to honor DN in server certificate requests?

[Martin Storsjö]

Hi,

I'm looking into an issue in using gnutls to do a DTLS handshake with 
browsers (for use with WebRTC).

If the server side of the handshake is firefox, with manually installed 
custom CAs in the browser (unrelated to the WebRTC setup at hand), the 
Certificate Request record from the server contains a nonzero list of CAs, 
listing the manually installed custom CAs.

The client side of the handshake only has got a self-signed certificate 
(completely unrelated to whatever extra CAs might be installed in the 
browser). Now since the client certificates don't match the DNs listed in 
the certificate request, gnutls doesn't pick any certificate to send at 
all, and sends an empty certificate record back.

(For comparison, if the client side is handled by openssl, it ignores the 
DNs here and just sends whatever client certificate that has been 
provided, regardless if this matches the certificate request.)

I guess this is a pretty uncommon scenario, since most users don't have 
manually installed CAs though.


I'm not completely sure which party is at fault here; I don't see RFC 5246 
clearly saying that if the list of CAs in the certificate request is 
non-empty, the response MUST match it, I only read this:

    certificate_authorities
       A list of the distinguished names [X501] of acceptable
       certificate_authorities, represented in DER-encoded format.  These
       distinguished names may specify a desired distinguished name for a
       root CA or for a subordinate CA; thus, this message can be used to
       describe known roots as well as a desired authorization space.  If
       the certificate_authorities list is empty, then the client MAY
       send any certificate of the appropriate ClientCertificateType,
       unless there is some external arrangement to the contrary.


Is firefox at fault here (sending unrelated CAs as part of this handshake 
- e.g. chrome doesn't send any such), or does gnutls need an option for 
intentionally ignoring the requested CAs and sending whatever certificate 
is provided, letting the server decide whether it is acceptable?

// Martin