Delegated Credentials for TLS
draft-ietf-tls-subcerts-01
Network Working Group R. Barnes
Internet-Draft Mozilla
Intended status: Standards Track S. Iyengar
Expires: January 3, 2019 Facebook
N. Sullivan
Cloudflare
E. Rescorla
RTFM, Inc.
July 02, 2018
Delegated Credentials for TLS
draft-ietf-tls-subcerts-01
Abstract
The organizational separation between the operator of a TLS server
and the certificate authority that provides it credentials can cause
problems, for example when it comes to reducing the lifetime of
certificates or supporting new cryptographic algorithms. This
document describes a mechanism to allow TLS server operators to
create their own credential delegations without breaking
compatibility with clients that do not support this specification.
Status of This Memo
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This Internet-Draft will expire on January 3, 2019.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. Solution Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.1. Rationale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.2. Related Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3. Client and Server behavior . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4. Delegated Credentials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
4.1. Certificate Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
5. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6.1. Security of delegated private key . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6.2. Revocation of delegated credentials . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6.3. Privacy considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
7. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
8. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
8.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
8.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
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) [RFC5246] [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
operators to limit the exposure of keys in cases that they do not
realize a compromise has occurred. The risk inherent in cross-
organizational transactions makes it operationally infeasible to rely
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