There might be some confusion here, as there is no refusal at all.
As stated in the blog post, we (Prosody) have been accepting (only) serverAuth certificates for a long time. However this is technically in violation of the relevant RFCs, and not the default behaviour of TLS libraries, so it's far from natural for software to be implementing this.
There was only one implementation discovered so far which was not accepting certificates unless they included the clientAuth purpose, and that was already updated 6+ months ago.
This blog post is intended to alert our users, and the broader XMPP community, about the issue that many were unaware of, and particularly to nudge server operators to upgrade their software if necessary, to avoid any federation issues on the network.
The article literally talks about how one of the server implementations does exactly that:
> Does this affect Prosody?
> Not directly. Let’s Encrypt is not the first CA to issue server-only certificates. Many years ago, we incorporated changes into Prosody which allow server-only certificates to be used for server-to-server connections, regardless of which server started the connection. [...]
XMPP identifiers have domain names, so the XMPP server can check that the DNS SAN matches the domain name of the identifiers in incoming XMPP messages.
I've seen non-XMPP systems where you configure the DNS name to require in the client certificate.
It's possible to do this securely, but I agree entirely with your other comment that using a public PKI with client certs is a recipe for disaster because it's so easy and common to screw up.
Yes, but then the lack of pragmatism shown by the XMPP community is a bit disconcerting
What is the lack of pragmatism you are talking about?
The refusal to accept server only certificate as client certificate for server
There might be some confusion here, as there is no refusal at all.
As stated in the blog post, we (Prosody) have been accepting (only) serverAuth certificates for a long time. However this is technically in violation of the relevant RFCs, and not the default behaviour of TLS libraries, so it's far from natural for software to be implementing this.
There was only one implementation discovered so far which was not accepting certificates unless they included the clientAuth purpose, and that was already updated 6+ months ago.
This blog post is intended to alert our users, and the broader XMPP community, about the issue that many were unaware of, and particularly to nudge server operators to upgrade their software if necessary, to avoid any federation issues on the network.
The article literally talks about how one of the server implementations does exactly that:
> Does this affect Prosody?
> Not directly. Let’s Encrypt is not the first CA to issue server-only certificates. Many years ago, we incorporated changes into Prosody which allow server-only certificates to be used for server-to-server connections, regardless of which server started the connection. [...]
It is not pragmatic to design your protocol for web use cases when it's not the web.
Unless im missing something, this is a poor design full stop. How are they validating SAN on these client certificates?
XMPP identifiers have domain names, so the XMPP server can check that the DNS SAN matches the domain name of the identifiers in incoming XMPP messages.
I've seen non-XMPP systems where you configure the DNS name to require in the client certificate.
It's possible to do this securely, but I agree entirely with your other comment that using a public PKI with client certs is a recipe for disaster because it's so easy and common to screw up.