Delegated Credentials for TLS
draft-ietf-tls-subcerts-02
Network Working Group R. Barnes
Internet-Draft Mozilla
Intended status: Standards Track S. Iyengar
Expires: February 18, 2019 Facebook
N. Sullivan
Cloudflare
E. Rescorla
RTFM, Inc.
August 17, 2018
Delegated Credentials for TLS
draft-ietf-tls-subcerts-02
Abstract
The organizational separation between the operator of a TLS server
and the certification authority can create limitations. For example,
the lifetime of certificates, how they may be used, and the
algorithms they support are ultimately determined by the
certification authority. This document describes a mechanism by
which operators may delegate their own credentials for use in TLS,
without breaking compatibility with clients that do not support this
specification.
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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and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
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This Internet-Draft will expire on February 18, 2019.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2018 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
Barnes, et al. Expires February 18, 2019 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft Delegated Credentials for TLS August 2018
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.1. Change Log . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Solution Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.1. Rationale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.2. Related Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3. Delegated Credentials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
3.1. Client and Server behavior . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
3.2. Certificate Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
4. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
5. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
5.1. Security of delegated private key . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
5.2. Revocation of delegated credentials . . . . . . . . . . . 10
5.3. Privacy considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
6. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
7. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
7.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
7.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
1. Introduction
Typically, a TLS server uses a certificate provided by some entity
other than the operator of the server (a "Certification Authority" or
CA) [RFC8446] [RFC5280]. This organizational separation makes the
TLS server operator dependent on the CA for some aspects of its
operations, for example:
o Whenever the server operator wants to deploy a new certificate, it
has to interact with the CA.
o The server operator can only use TLS authentication schemes for
which the CA will issue credentials.
These dependencies cause problems in practice. Server operators
often want to create short-lived certificates for servers in low-
trust zones such as CDNs or remote data centers. This allows server
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