Exported Authenticators in TLS
draft-ietf-tls-exported-authenticator-03
TLS N. Sullivan
Internet-Draft Cloudflare Inc.
Intended status: Standards Track July 17, 2017
Expires: January 18, 2018
Exported Authenticators in TLS
draft-ietf-tls-exported-authenticator-03
Abstract
This document describes a mechanism in Transport Layer Security (TLS)
to provide an exportable proof of ownership of a certificate that can
be transmitted out of band and verified by the other party.
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
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Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
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This Internet-Draft will expire on January 18, 2018.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2017 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
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described in the Simplified BSD License.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. Authenticator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. API considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
4. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
5. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
6. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
6.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
6.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1. Introduction
This document provides a way to authenticate one party of a Transport
Layer Security (TLS) communication to another using a certificate
after the session has been established. This allows both the client
and server to prove ownership of additional identities at any time
after the handshake has completed. This proof of authentication can
be exported and transmitted out of band from one party to be
validated by the other party.
This mechanism provides two advantages over the authentication that
TLS natively provides:
multiple identities - Endpoints that are authoritative for multiple
identities - but do not have a single certificate that includes
all of the identities - can authenticate with those identities
over a single connection.
spontaneous authentication - Endpoints can authenticate after a
connection is established, in response to events in a higher-layer
protocol, as well as integrating more context.
This document intends to replace much of the functionality of
renegotiation in previous versions of TLS. It has the advantages
over renegotiation of not requiring additional on-the-wire changes
during a connection. For simplicity, only TLS 1.2 and later are
supported.
Post-handshake authentication is defined in TLS 1.3, but it has the
disadvantage of requiring additional state to be stored in the TLS
state machine and it composes poorly with multiplexed connection
protocols like HTTP/2. It is also only available for client
authentication. This mechanism is intended to be used as part of a
replacement for post-handshake authentication in applications.
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2. Authenticator
The authenticator is a structured message that can be exported from
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