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With public CAs, you can only apply for a wildcard at a single label. You can't have nested wildcards.

RFC6125 limits wildcards to a left-most label (6.4.3. paragraph 2): https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6125.html#section-6.4.3

I don't know of any CA that allows for wildcard characters within the label, other than when the whole label is a wildcard, but it is possible under that RFC.

The CA/Browser Forum's baseline requirements dictates how any publicly trusted CA should operate, and it defines a wildcard certificate in section 1.6.1 (page 26) here https://cabforum.org/working-groups/server/baseline-requirem...

> Wildcard Certificate: A Certificate containing at least one Wildcard Domain Name in the Subject Alternative Names in the Certificate.

> Wildcard Domain Name: A string starting with “*.” (U+002A ASTERISK, U+002E FULL STOP) immediately followed by a Fully‐Qualified Domain Name.

Now of course with your own internal CA, you have complete free reign to issue certificates - as long as they comply with the technical requirements of your software (i.e. webserver and client).

Also note that a cert issued as '..example.com.' would only match 'hi.com.example.com.', not an additional three labels.




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