A bit over a year ago, in July 2019, the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ initiated the development of an OpenSSL patch that supports Email Address Internationalization (EAI) in electronic signature certificates. RFC 8398 support has been added to the OpenSSL cryptographic toolkit version currently being developed. This specification describes the use of EAI addresses in X.509 certificates.
The patch complies with the RFC 8398 specification “Internationalized Email Addresses in X.509 Certificates.” This patch was used to finalize the new version of OpenSSL 3.0. After its release, which is scheduled to take place before the end of this year, EAI support in X.509 will become generally available and fully reliable, in particular, when verifying emails signed with X.509 certificates.
“You have to understand that the exact date of the OpenSSL 3.0 release is currently unknown, and a lot of time will pass before the release gets into popular distributions. But nevertheless, email client manufacturers can already have this software in mind,” said Dmitry Belyavsky, developer of the accepted patch and OpenSSL committer.
This means another software product will soon receive the Universal Acceptance Ready status. For more information about the implementation of the principles of universal acceptance in software, visit the website of the project Поддерживаю.РФ.
