Handling Large Certificates and Long Certificate Chains in TLS-based EAP Methods
draft-ietf-emu-eaptlscert-02
Network Working Group M. Sethi
Internet-Draft J. Mattsson
Intended status: Informational Ericsson
Expires: September 17, 2020 S. Turner
sn3rd
March 16, 2020
Handling Large Certificates and Long Certificate Chains
in TLS-based EAP Methods
draft-ietf-emu-eaptlscert-02
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
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute
working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-
Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
This Internet-Draft will expire on September 17, 2020.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2020 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
(https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
publication of this document. Please review these documents
carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
Sethi, et al. Expires September 17, 2020 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft Certificates in TLS-based EAP Methods March 2020
to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must
include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
described in the Simplified BSD License.
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 . . . . . . 5
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 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
4.2.3. Compressing Certificates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
4.2.4. Suppressing Intermediate Certificates . . . . . . . . 8
4.2.5. Using Fewer Intermediate Certificates . . . . . . . . 8
4.3. Updating Authenticators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
5. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
7. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
7.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
7.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
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. This is because EAP peers often
Show full document text