Extended Validation, or EV, certificates are designed to provide evidence of a greater level of verification by the Certificate Authority of the legal identity of the company in control of the SSL certificate and domain name. By way of contrast, the most common type of certificate, domain-validated, only requires the CA to verify control of the domain name. Browsers display EV-specific cues within the user interface to highlight this additional verification: most notably, the company name is displayed in the address bar, often with a green padlock or a green bar.

An Extended Validation certificate for login.live.com in Google Chrome

EV certificates are subject to additional requirements, over and above those specified in the Baseline Requirements. As with the Baseline Requirements, the EV guidelines were drawn up by the CA/B forum, an industry group of both browser vendors and CAs. The EV guidelines prohibit EV certificates from using wildcards (i.e. www.example.com, mail.example.com, and paypal.example.com would all match *.example.com) and explicitly mention this restriction twice “Wildcard certificates are not allowed for EV Certificates”.

Nevertheless, Verizon Business has chosen to test browsers’ approach to wildcard EV certificates by issuing a certificate to Accenture for *.cclearning.accenture.com. Verizon Business — which is not a member of the CA/B forum — is known for its maverick approach to certificate issuance having issued certificates (including EV certificates) which violate the Baseline Requirements.

Despite the EV guidelines prohibiting wildcard EV certificate issuance, presently most major browsers fail to enforce this restriction. Google Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari (Desktop) all retain the EV browser cues when visiting a website using this EV certificate.

The only exception was Safari — Desktop Safari displays the EV browser cues as normal, as do the remainder of the desktop browsers; however, Safari on iOS 7 does not display the EV UI.

Safari (Desktop)

Safari on iOS 7 does not display the conventional EV UI for the wildcard EV certificate. An example of the EV UI in iOS 7.

Netcraft offers a Baseline Requirements checking service for CAs to provide third-party verification of Baseline Requirements conformance. For more information contact sales@netcraft.com