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I know that an SSL wildcard certificate (*.example.org) can be used to support many names under the domain (a.example.org, b.example.org, c.example.org). I also know that the * is only good for matching a single level of name. That is, *.example.org will not work on a.b.example.org.

What if I used a certificate with the name ..example.org? I'd like to build a certificate with the following name configuration:

CN=example.org
subjectAltName=DNS:example.org, DNS:*.example.org, DNS:*.*.example.org, DNS:*.*.*.example.org

I've tried building a few like this as self-signed certificates, but I've not had good results. For example, chrome tells me "Server's certificate does not match the URL."

Is it possible to have nested wildcards in a certificate, or do the popular browsers not support this?

edit I believe it's possible to build a cert like this: I've done so with OpenSSL. It just looks like browsers understand it. I was hoping for confirmation of that, or if I'm lucky, a "here's how you do it."

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  • What would be the point? why not just use hyphens to separate... Mar 14, 2013 at 15:55
  • Because that's a "wrong" use of DNS (in my case). I might have an application that has multiple servers. So, I might create a DNS subzone "app1.example.com" and put all my app1 servers behind it. I could just get another wildcard for *.app1.example.com, but if I could get a cert with CN=*.example.com, SAN=[example.com *.*.example.com], I could put that on a load balancer and have it work for most situations. Nov 8, 2013 at 17:01

1 Answer 1

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Some SSL cert providers do something similar to this by providing a "subject alternative name" feature within their wildcard certs.

Digicert apparently does this but I'm not sure if Verisign does.

http://www.digicert.com/welcome/wildcard-plus.htm

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  • It doesn't appear that Digicert allows you to put another wildcard in as a SAN, at least, their documentation doesn't read that way. Nov 8, 2013 at 16:56

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