Handling Large Certificates and Long Certificate Chains in TLS-based EAP Methods
draft-ietf-emu-eaptlscert-00
Network Working Group M. Sethi
Internet-Draft J. Mattsson
Intended status: Informational Ericsson
Expires: February 14, 2020 S. Turner
sn3rd
August 13, 2019
Handling Large Certificates and Long Certificate Chains
in TLS-based EAP Methods
draft-ietf-emu-eaptlscert-00
Abstract
EAP-TLS and other TLS-based EAP methods are widely deployed and used
for network access authentication. Large certificates and long
certificate chains combined with authenticators that drop an EAP
session after only 40 - 50 round-trips is a major deployment problem.
This memo looks at the this problem in detail and describes the
potential solutions available.
Status of This Memo
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provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
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This Internet-Draft will expire on February 14, 2020.
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Sethi, et al. Expires February 14, 2020 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft Certificates in TLS-based EAP Methods August 2019
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. Experience with Deployments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
4. Handling of Large Certificates and Long Certificate Chains . 4
4.1. Updating Certificates and Certificate Chains . . . . . . 4
4.1.1. Guidelines for certificates . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
4.2. Updating TLS and EAP-TLS Code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4.2.1. Pre-distributing and Omitting CA Certificates . . . . 6
4.2.2. Caching Certificates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4.2.3. Compressing Certificates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
4.2.4. Suppressing Intermediate Certificates . . . . . . . . 7
4.3. Updating Authenticators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
6. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
7. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
7.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
7.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1. Introduction
The Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP), defined in [RFC3748],
provides a standard mechanism for support of multiple authentication
methods. EAP-Transport Layer Security (EAP-TLS) [RFC5216]
[I-D.ietf-emu-eap-tls13] relies on TLS [RFC8446] to provide strong
mutual authentication with certificates [RFC5280] and is widely
deployed and often used for network access authentication. There are
also many other TLS-based EAP methods, such as FAST [RFC4851], TTLS
[RFC5281], TEAP [RFC7170], and possibly many vendor specific EAP
methods.
TLS certificates are often relatively large, and the certificate
chains are often long. Unlike the use of TLS on the web, where
typically only the TLS server is authenticated; EAP-TLS deployments
typically authenticates both the EAP peer and the EAP server. Also,
from deployment experience, EAP peers typically have longer
certificate chains than servers. Therefore, EAP-TLS authentication
usually involve significantly more bytes than when TLS is used as
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