A comment and a question, Bob; the comment:

My experience with Communicator 4.79 is that it can handle a 
certificate that has no E component in the DN (although it does
have the subjectAltName extension) - and will allow you to sign 
e-mail (so long as the keyUsage & extendedKeyUsage extensions 
permit this).  

However, given this, rather unfortunate limitation, it is easy 
to create an e-mail that claims to be from anybody you want to be 
(by putting in the appropriate e-mail address in the Preferences), 
and yet have a validly signed e-mail. If the reader does not 
actually click on the "Signed" icon to see who signed it, they 
could easily fall into the trap and assume that it was signed by 
the sender.

The question: are there any plans to fix the existing Communicator
code to validate the From address with the e-mail address in the 
subjectAltName?  I'm guessing from this thread that the 6.x code
will have that fix.

Arshad Noor


Robert Relyea wrote:

--snip--
> 
> This is hardly the first implementation of S/MIME. We will already face
> the problem that older versions don't even understand subjectAltName,
> yet alone handle a multiple email address to single cert mapping.
>   Existing versions of Communicator will downright choke on Certs
> presented as email certs without the email address in the SubjectName.
> 
--snip--

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