Handling Large Certificates and Long Certificate Chains in TLS-based EAP Methods
draft-ietf-emu-eaptlscert-08
Network Working Group M. Sethi
Internet-Draft J. Mattsson
Intended status: Informational Ericsson
Expires: May 24, 2021 S. Turner
sn3rd
November 20, 2020
Handling Large Certificates and Long Certificate Chains
in TLS-based EAP Methods
draft-ietf-emu-eaptlscert-08
Abstract
The Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP), defined in RFC3748,
provides a standard mechanism for support of multiple authentication
methods. EAP-Transport Layer Security (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 document looks at
this problem in detail and describes the potential solutions
available.
Status of This Memo
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This Internet-Draft will expire on May 24, 2021.
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This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
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Sethi, et al. Expires May 24, 2021 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft Certificates in TLS-based EAP Methods November 2020
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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 . 5
4.1. Updating Certificates and Certificate Chains . . . . . . 5
4.1.1. Guidelines for Certificates . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4.1.2. Pre-distributing and Omitting CA certificates . . . . 7
4.1.3. Using Fewer Intermediate Certificates . . . . . . . . 7
4.2. Updating TLS and EAP-TLS Code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
4.2.1. URLs for Client Certificates . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
4.2.2. Caching Certificates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
4.2.3. Compressing Certificates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
4.2.4. Compact TLS 1.3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
4.2.5. Suppressing Intermediate Certificates . . . . . . . . 9
4.2.6. Raw Public Keys . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
4.2.7. New Certificate Types and Compression Algorithms . . 10
4.3. Updating Authenticators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
5. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
6. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
7. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
7.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
7.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
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 Flexible
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