Limited Additional Mechanisms for PKIX and SMIME
charter-ietf-lamps-02-00
| Document | Proposed charter | Limited Additional Mechanisms for PKIX and SMIME WG (lamps) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Title | Limited Additional Mechanisms for PKIX and SMIME | ||
| Last updated | 2018-05-22 | ||
| State | Informal IESG review Rechartering | ||
| WG | State | Active | |
| IESG | Responsible AD | Eric Rescorla | |
| Charter Edit AD | Eric Rescorla | ||
| Telechat date | (None) | ||
| Send notices to | (None) | ||
Charter
charter-ietf-lamps-02-00
The PKIX and S/MIME Working Groups have been closed for some time. Some updates have been proposed to the X.509 certificate documents produced by the PKIX Working Group and the electronic mail security documents produced by the S/MIME Working Group. The LAMPS (Limited Additional Mechanisms for PKIX and SMIME) Working Group is chartered to make updates where there is a known constituency interested in real deployment and there is at least one sufficiently well specified approach to the update so that the working group can sensibly evaluate whether to adopt a proposal. The LAMPS WG is now tackling these topics: 1. Specify a discovery mechanism for CAA records to replace the one described in RFC 6844. Implementation experience has demonstrated an ambiguity in the handling of CNAME and DNAME records during discovery in RFC 6844, and subsequent discussion has suggested that a different discovery approach would resolve limitations inherent in that approach. 2. Specify the use of SHAKE128/256 and SHAKE256/512 for PKIX and S/MIME. Unlike the previous hashing standards, the SHA-3 family of functions are the outcome of an open competition. They have a clear design rationale and have received a lot of public analysis, giving great confidence that the SHA-3 family of functions are secure. Also, since SHA-3 uses a very different construction from SHA-2, the SHA-3 family of functions offers an excellent alternative. In particular, SHAKE128/256 and SHAKE256/512 offer security and performance benefits. 3. Specify the use of short-lived X.509 certificates for which no revocation information is made available by the Certification Authority. Short-lived certificates have a lifespan that is shorter than the time needed to detect, report, and distribute revocation information, as a result revoking them pointless. 4. Specify the use of a pre-shared key (PSK) along with other key management techniques with supported by the Cryptographic Message Syntax (CMS) as a near-term mechanism to protect present day communication from the future invention of a large-scale quantum computer. The invention of a such a quantum computer would pose a serious challenge for the key management algorithms that are widely deployed, especially the key transport and key agreement algorithms used today with the CMS to protect S/MIME messages. 5. Specify the use of hash-based signatures with the Cryptographic Message Syntax (CMS). A hash-based signature uses small private and public keys, and it has low computational cost; however, the signature values are quite large. For this reason they might not be used for signing X.509 certificates or S/MIME messages, but they are secure even if a large-scale quantum computer is invented. These properties make hash-based signatures useful in some environments, such a the distribution of software updates. 6. Specifies a certificate extension that is carried in a self-signed certificate for a trust anchor, which is often called a Root Certification Authority (CA) certificate, to identify the next public key that will be used by the trust anchor. In addition, the LAMPS WG may investigate other updates to documents produced by the PKIX and S/MIME WGs, but the LAMPS WG shall not adopt any of these potential work items without rechartering.
Proposed milestones
No milestones for charter found.