VU#573195: Go, OpenSSL, Apple, LibreSSL, pyca, wolfSSL Name-Constraint Inconsistency in RFC 5280 Implementation

Publisher excerpt From CERT/CC Vulnerability Notes

Overview This note covers differences in how TLS libraries interpret X.509 Name Constraints. A certificate that one library accepts may be rejected by another. Some of those differences are defects; others follow from behavior that RFC 5280 does not fully specify. Description The observed differences concern DNS name comparison, IP address handling, URI-authority parsing, and wildcard matching. These include both implementation defects and behavior not fully specified by RFC 5280. DNS-name comparison. RFC 5280 requires case-insensitive matching for DNS names. GnuTLS compared some names' case-sensitivity at the time of reporting (CVE-2026-3833, later fixed in 3.8.13). A distinct Go report concerns case handling in wildcard parent-constraint lookup, not ordinary hostname comparison. IP address handling. RFC 5280 defines separate IPv4 and IPv6 encodings and does not say whether IPv4-mapped IPv6 addresses should be treated as IPv4. Some libraries treat the two forms as different, so a constraint written for one form may not apply to the other. URI-authority parsing. RFC 3986 allows optional userinfo before the host. Implementations differ on which host they extract when @, a colon, or a query or fragment is present. OpenSSL merged PR #30319 for an @ in the path, query, or fragment; a separate userinfo-colon report is not covered by that confirmation. Related differences have been reported in other libraries. A well-formed single @ is handled per RFC 3986 by most implementa…

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