How to allow an Active Directory Certificate Authority to generate Certificates with a Subject Alternative Name attribute

Starting with Google Chrome 58 no longer trusts certificates without the Subject Alternative Name attribute, so this makes it a little troublesome for those with internal CAs where you rely on them for Software Development. We noticed last week that some end users couldn’t hit an internal application over HTTPS, but was fine in Firefox and IE. After a quick search, I’d found the culprit was a change in the behavior of Google Chrome to adhere more stringently to RFC 2818. So I went to work on our CA in enabling certificates to be requested with the Subject Alternative Name Attribute.

Start an administrative command prompt on one of your intermediate CA server and issue the following command;

certutil -setreg policy\EditFlags +EDITF_ATTRIBUTESUBJECTALTNAME2

You’ll then need to restart Certificate Services. Once done, best thing to do is to create a new Template (ours is called Dev Web Servers) along with giving the right permissions to allow users or machines to enroll and begin issuing the new certificates. We do this manually at the moment via the Web interface so when requesting a certificate you need to fill in the attribute text field with the following (like the image to the left)

san:dns=hostname1&dns=hostname2&dns=devweb2

Fill in the dns= part until you cover off all of the sites you need. Complete the request to install the certificate onto your server and adjust the SSL bindings to use the new certificate.