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Security Services for the Industrial Internet Identifier Data Access Protocol (IIIDAP)
draft-mcd-identifier-access-security-08

Document Type Active Internet-Draft (individual)
Authors Chendi Ma , Jian Chen , Xiaotian Fan , Meilan Chen , Zhiping Li
Last updated 2023-12-18
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draft-mcd-identifier-access-security-08
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)                           C. Ma
Internet Draft                                                J. Chen
Intended status: Informational                                  X. Fan
Expires: June 21, 2024                                         M. Chen
                                                                  Z. Li
             China Academy of Information and Communications Technology
                                                     December 21, 2023

    Security Services for the Industrial Internet Identifier Data Access
                             Protocol (IIIDAP)
                  draft-mcd-identifier-access-security-08

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
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   This Internet-Draft will expire on June 21, 2024.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2023 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
   (http://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

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   respect 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.

Abstract

   The Industrial Internet Identifier Data Access Protocol (IIIDAP)
   provides "RESTful" web services to retrieve identifier metadata from
   Second-Level Node (SLN). This document describes information
   security services, including access control, authentication,
   authorization, availability, data confidentiality, and data
   integrity for IIIDAP.

Table of Contents

   1. Introduction ................................................ 2
   2. Conventions used in this document............................ 3
      2.1. Acronyms and Abbreviations.............................. 3
   3. Information Security Services and IIIDAP..................... 3
      3.1. Access Control ......................................... 3
      3.2. Authentication ......................................... 3
      3.3. Authorization .......................................... 4
      3.4. Availability ........................................... 5
      3.5. Data Confidentiality.................................... 5
      3.6. Data Integrity ......................................... 6
   4. Privacy Threats Associated with Industrial Internet Identifier
   Data ........................................................... 7
   5. Security Considerations...................................... 7
   6. IANA Considerations ......................................... 8
   7. References .................................................. 8
      7.1. Normative References.................................... 8
      7.2. Informative References.................................. 9

1. Introduction

   One goal of IIIDAP is to provide security services, including access
   control, authentication, authorization, availability, data
   confidentiality, and data integrity. This document describes how
   each of these services is achieved by IIIDAP using features that are
   available in other protocol layers. Additional or alternative
   mechanisms can be added in the future.

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2. Conventions used in this document

   The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
   document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [RFC2119].

2.1. Acronyms and Abbreviations

   HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol

   JSON: JavaScript Object Notation

   IIIDAP: Industrial Internet Identifier Data Access Protocol

   SLN: Second-Level Nodes

   ELN: Enterprise-Level Nodes

   TLS: Transport Layer Security

3. Information Security Services and IIIDAP

   IIIDAP itself does not include native security services. Instead,
   IIIDAP relies on features that are available in other protocol
   layers to provide needed security services, including access
   control, authentication, authorization, availability, data
   confidentiality, and data integrity. A description of each of these
   security services can be found in "Internet Security Glossary,
   Version 2" [RFC4949]. No requirements have been identified for other
   security services.

3.1. Access Control

   As described in the following sections, IIIDAP includes features to
   identify, authenticate, and authorize clients, allowing server
   operators to control access to information based on a client's
   identity and associated authorizations. Information returned to a
   client can be clearly marked with a status value (see Section 13 of
   [IDENTIFIER-RESPONSES]) that identifies the access granted to the
   client.

3.2. Authentication

   This section describes security authentication mechanisms and the
   need for authorization policies to include them. It describes
   requirements for the implementations of clients and servers but does
   not dictate the policies of server operators. For example, a server

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   operator with no policy regarding differentiated or tiered access to
   data will have no authorization mechanisms and will have no need for
   any type of authentication. A server operator with policies on
   differentiated access will have to construct an authorization scheme
   and will need to follow the specified authentication requirements.

   IIIDAP's authentication framework needs to accommodate anonymous
   access as well as verification of identities using a range of
   authentication methods and credential services. To that end, IIIDAP
   clients and servers MUST implement the authentication framework
   [RFC9110]. The "basic" scheme can be used to send a client's user
   name and password to a server in plaintext, base64-encoded form. The
   "digest" scheme can be used to authenticate a client without
   exposing the client's plaintext password. If the "basic" scheme is
   used, HTTP over TLS [RFC9110] MUST be used to protect the client's
   credentials from disclosure while in transit (see Section 3.5).

   Servers MUST support either Basic or Digest authentication; they are
   not required to support both. Clients MUST support both to
   interoperate with servers that support one or the other. Servers may
   provide a login page that triggers HTTP authentication. Clients
   should continue sending the HTTP authentication header once they
   receive an initial 401 (Unauthorized) response from the HTTP server
   as long as the scheme portion of the URL doesn't change.

   The Transport Layer Security protocol [RFC8446] includes an optional
   feature to identify and authenticate clients who possess and present
   a valid X.509 digital certificate [RFC5280]. Support for this
   feature is OPTIONAL.

   IIIDAP does not impose any unique server authentication
   requirements. The server authentication provided by TLS fully
   addresses the needs of IIIDAP. In general, transports for IIIDAP
   must either provide a TLS-protected transport (e.g., HTTPS) or a
   mechanism that provides an equivalent level of server
   authentication.

   Work on HTTP authentication methods continues. IIIDAP is designed to
   be agile enough to support additional methods as they are defined.

3.3. Authorization

   Server operators MAY offer varying degrees of access depending on
   policy and need in conjunction with the authentication methods
   described in Section 3.2. If such varying degrees of access are
   supported, an IIIDAP server MUST provide granular access controls

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   (that is, per identifier metadata) in order to implement
   authorization policies. Some examples:

   - Clients will be allowed access only to data for which they have a
   relationship.

   - Unauthenticated or anonymous access status may not yield any
   contact information.

   - Full access may be granted to a special group of authenticated
   clients.

   The type of access allowed by a server will most likely vary from
   one operator to the next. A description of the response privacy
   considerations associated with different levels of authorization can
   be found in Section 13 of [IDENTIFIER-RESPONSES].

3.4. Availability

   An IIIDAP service has to be available to be useful. There are no
   IIIDAP-unique requirements to provide availability, but as a general
   security consideration, a service operator needs to be aware of the
   issues associated with denial of service. A thorough reading of
   "Internet Denial-of-Service Considerations" [RFC4732] is advised.

   An IIIDAP service MAY use an HTTP throttling mechanism to limit the
   number of queries that a single client can send in a given period of
   time. If used, the server SHOULD return an HTTP 429 (Too Many
   Requests) response code as described in "Additional HTTP Status
   Codes" [RFC6585]. A client that receives a 429 response SHOULD
   decrease its query rate and honor the Retry-After header field if
   one is present. Note that this is not a defense against denial-of-
   service attacks, since a malicious client could ignore the code and
   continue to send queries at a high rate. A server might use another
   response code if it did not wish to reveal to a client that rate
   limiting is the reason for the denial of a reply.

3.5. Data Confidentiality

   IIIDAP uses HTTP over TLS [RFC9110] to provide that protection by
   encrypting all traffic sent on the connection between client and
   server. HTTP over TLS MUST be used to protect all client-server
   exchanges unless operational constraints make it impossible to meet
   this requirement. It is also possible to encrypt discrete objects
   (such as command path segments and JSON- encoded response objects)
   at one endpoint, send them to the other endpoint via an unprotected
   transport protocol, and decrypt the object on receipt. Encryption

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   algorithms as described in "Internet Security Glossary, Version 2"
   [RFC4949] are commonly used to provide data confidentiality at the
   object level.

   There are no current requirements for object-level data
   confidentiality using encryption. Support for this feature could be
   added to IIIDAP in the future.

   As noted in Section 3.2, the HTTP "basic" authentication scheme can
   be used to authenticate a client. When this scheme is used, HTTP
   over TLS MUST be used to protect the client's credentials from
   disclosure while in transit. If the policy of the server operator
   requires encryption to protect client-server data exchanges (such as
   to protect non-public data that cannot be accessed without client
   identification and authentication), HTTP over TLS MUST be used to
   protect those exchanges.

   A description of privacy threats that can be addressed with
   confidentiality services can be found in Section 4. Section 13 of
   [IDENTIFIER-RESPONSES] describes status values that can be used to
   describe operator actions used to protect response data from
   disclosure to unauthorized clients.

3.6. Data Integrity

   Web services such as IIIDAP commonly use HTTP over TLS [RFC9110] to
   provide that protection by using a keyed Message Authentication Code
   (MAC) to detect modifications. It is also possible to sign discrete
   objects (such as command path segments and JSON-encoded response
   objects) at one endpoint, send them to the other endpoint via a
   transport protocol, and validate the signature of the object on
   receipt. Digital signature algorithms as described in "Internet
   Security Glossary, Version 2" [RFC4949] are commonly used to provide
   data integrity at the object level.

   There are no current requirements for object-level data integrity
   using digital signatures. Support for this feature could be added to
   IIIDAP in the future.

   The most specific need for this service is to provide assurance that
   HTTP 30x redirection hints [RFC9110] and response elements returned
   from the server are not modified while in transit. If the policy of
   the server operator requires message integrity for client-server
   data exchanges, HTTP over TLS MUST be used to protect those
   exchanges.

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4. Privacy Threats Associated with Industrial Internet Identifier Data

   The identifiers' information of ELN SHOULD be uploaded to SLN. The
   standardization of IIIDAP does not change or impact the data that
   operators of SLN may require to be collected from ELN, but it
   provides support for a number of mechanisms that may be used to
   mitigate privacy threats to ELN should SLN choose to use them.

   IIIDAP includes mechanisms that can be used to authenticate clients,
   allowing servers to support tiered access based on local policy.
   This means that all identifier data need no longer be public, and
   personal data or data that may be considered more sensitive can have
   its access restricted to specifically privileged clients.

   IIIDAP data structures allow servers to indicate via status values
   when data returned to clients has been made private, redacted,
   obscured, by a proxy. "Private" means that the data is not
   designated for public consumption. "Redacted" means that some
   identifier data fields are not being made available. "Obscured"
   means that data has been altered for the purposes of not readily
   revealing the actual identifier information.

   In addition to privacy risks to the information of identifiers,
   there are also potential privacy risks for those who query
   identifier data. For example, the fact that a SLN employee performs
   a particular query may reveal information about the employee's
   activities that he or she would have preferred to keep private.
   IIIDAP supports the use of HTTP over TLS to provide privacy
   protection for those querying identifier data, unless operational
   constraints make it impossible to meet this requirement.

5. Security Considerations

   This document describes the security services provided by IIIDAP and
   associated protocol layers, including authentication, authorization,
   availability, data confidentiality, and data integrity.

   As an HTTP-based protocol, IIIDAP is susceptible to code injection
   attacks. Code injection refers to adding code into a computer system
   or program to alter the course of execution. There are many types of
   code injection, including SQL injection, dynamic variable or
   function injection, include-file injection, shell injection, and
   HTML-script injection, among others. Data confidentiality and
   integrity services provide a measure of defense against man-in-the-
   middle injection attacks, but vulnerabilities in both client- and
   server-side software make it possible for injection attacks to

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   succeed. Consistently checking and validating server credentials can
   help detect man-in-the-middle attacks.

   There is a risk of too promiscuous, or even rogue, CAs being
   included in the list of acceptable CAs that the TLS server sends the
   client as part of the TLS client-authentication handshake and
   lending the appearance of trust to certificates signed by those CAs.
   Periodic monitoring of the list of CAs that IIIDAP servers trust for
   client authentication can help reduce this risk.

   The Transport Layer Security protocol [RFC8446] includes a null
   cipher suite that does not encrypt data and thus does not provide
   data confidentiality. This option MUST NOT be used when data
   confidentiality services are needed. Additional considerations for
   secure use of TLS are described in [RFC9325].

   Data integrity services are sometimes mistakenly associated with
   directory service operational policy requirements focused on data
   accuracy. "Accuracy" refers to the truthful association of data
   elements (such as names, addresses, and telephone numbers). Accuracy
   requirements are out of scope for this protocol.

   Additional security considerations are described in the
   specifications for HTTP [RFC9110], HTTP Basic and Digest access
   authentication [RFC9110], HTTP over TLS [RFC9110], and additional
   HTTP status codes [RFC6585].

6. IANA Considerations

7. References

   References to IIIDAP are subject to the latest edition.

7.1. Normative References

   [RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
             Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997,
             <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>.

   [RFC6585] Nottingham, M. and R. Fielding, "Additional HTTP Status
             Codes", RFC 6585, April 2012,
             <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6585>.

   [RFC9110] Fielding, R., Ed., M. Nottingham, Ed. and J. Reschke, Ed.,
             " HTTP Semantics", RFC 9110, June 2022,
             <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc9110>.

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7.2. Informative References

   [RFC4732] Handley, M., Ed., Rescorla, E., Ed., and IAB, "Internet
             Denial-of-Service Considerations", RFC 4732, December
             2006, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4732>.

   [RFC4949] Shirey, R., "Internet Security Glossary, Version 2", FYI
             36, RFC 4949, August 2007,
             <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4949>.

   [RFC5280] Cooper, D., Santesson, S., Farrell, S., Boeyen, S.,
             Housley, R., and W. Polk, "Internet X.509 Public Key
             Infrastructure Certificate and Certificate Revocation List
             (CRL) Profile", RFC 5280, May 2008,
             <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5280>.

   [RFC8446] E. Rescorla, "The Transport Layer Security (TLS) Protocol
             Version 1.3", RFC 8446, August 2018,
             <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8446>.

   [RFC9325] Y. Sheffer, P. Saint-Andre and T. Fossati "Recommendations
             for Secure Use of Transport Layer Security (TLS) and
             Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS)", RFC 9325,
             November 2022,
             <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc9325>.

   [IDENTIFIER-RESPONSES]
             Ma, C., "JSON Responses for the Industrial Internet
             Identifier Data Access Protocol (IIIDAP)", Work in
             Progress, draft-mcd-identifier-access-responce, December
             2023.

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Authors' Addresses

   Chendi Ma
   CAICT
   No.52 Huayuan North Road, Haidian District
   Beijing, Beijing, 100191
   China

   Phone: +86 177 1090 9864
   Email: machendi@caict.ac.cn

   Chen Jian
   CAICT
   No.52 Huayuan North Road, Haidian District
   Beijing, Beijing, 100191
   China

   Phone: +86 138 1103 3332
   Email: chenjian3@caict.ac.cn

   Xiaotian Fan
   CAICT
   No.52 Huayuan North Road, Haidian District
   Beijing, Beijing, 100191
   China

   Phone: +86 134 0108 6945
   Email: fanxiaotian@caict.ac.cn

   Meilan Chen
   CAICT
   No.52 Huayuan North Road, Haidian District
   Beijing, Beijing, 100191
   China

   Phone: +86 139 1143 7301
   Email: chenmeilan@caict.ac.cn

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   Zhiping Li
   CAICT
   No.52 Huayuan North Road, Haidian District
   Beijing, Beijing, 100191
   China

   Phone: +86 185 1107 1386
   Email: lizhiping@caict.ac.cn

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