Network Working Group P. Hoffman
Internet-Draft VPN Consortium
Intended status: Standards Track J. Schlyter
Expires: February 23, 2012 Kirei AB
August 22, 2011
Using Secure DNS to Associate Certificates with Domain Names For S/MIME
draft-hoffman-dane-smime-01
Abstract
S/MIME uses certificates for authenticating and encrypting messages.
Users want their mail user agents to securely associate a certificate
with the sender of an encrypted and/or signed message. DNSSEC
provides a mechanism for a zone operator to sign DNS information
directly. This way, bindings of certificates to users within a
domain are asserted not by external entities, but by the entities
that operate the DNS. This document describes how to use secure DNS
to associate an S/MIME user's certificate with the intended domain
name.
IMPORTANT NOTE: This draft is intentionally sketchy. It is meant as
a possible starting point for the DANE WG if it wants to consider
making a protocol similar to TLSA, as described in
draft-ietf-dane-protocol, but that applies to S/MIME. The WG may or
may not want to adopt such work, or if it does, may want to use a
very different scheme from the one described here.
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
working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-
Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
This Internet-Draft will expire on February 23, 2012.
Copyright Notice
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Copyright (c) 2011 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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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.1. Certificate Associations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.2. Securing Certificate Associations . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.3. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. The SMIMEA Resource Record . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. Domain Names for S/MIME Certificate Associations . . . . . . . 4
4. Use of S/MIME Certificate Associations in S/MIME . . . . . . . 4
5. Mandatory-to-Implement Algorithms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
6. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
7. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
8. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
9. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
9.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
9.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
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1. Introduction
S/MIME [RFC5751] messages often contain a certificate. This
certificate assists in authenticating the sender of the message and
can be used for encrypting messages that will be sent in reply. In
order for the S/MIME receiver to authenticate that a message is from
the sender whom is identified in the message the receiver's mail user
agent (MUA) must validate that this certificate is associated with
the purported sender. Currently, the MUA must trust a trust anchor
upon which the sender's certificate is rooted, and must successfully
validate the certificate.
Some people want a different way to authenticate the association of
the sender's certificate with the sender without trusting a CA.
Given that the DNS administrator for a domain name is authorized to
give identifying information about the zone, it makes sense to allow
that administrator to also make an authoritative binding between
email messages purporting to come from the domain name and a
certificate that might be used by someone authorized to send mail
from those servers. The easiest way to do this is to use the DNS.
[[ More here about additional uses, such as CMS that is not S/MIME
where the certificates have email addresses for the subject name. ]]
1.1. Certificate Associations
[[ Will mostly duplicate the text from Section 1.1 of
draft-ietf-dane-protocol ]]
1.2. Securing Certificate Associations
[[ Will mostly duplicate the text from Section 1.2 of
draft-ietf-dane-protocol ]]
1.3. Terminology
[[ Will mostly duplicate the text from Section 1.3 of
draft-ietf-dane-protocol ]]
2. The SMIMEA Resource Record
[[ Will mostly duplicate the text from Section 2 of
draft-ietf-dane-protocol, but will define "SMIMEA" instead of "TLSA".
]]
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3. Domain Names for S/MIME Certificate Associations
Domain names are prepared for requests in the following manner.
1. The user name (the "left-hand side" of the email address, called
the "local-part" in RFC 2822 [RFC2822]) becomes the left-most
label in the prepared domain name. This does not include the "@"
character that separates the left and right sides of the email
address.
2. The string "_smimecert" becomes the second left-most label in the
prepared domain name.
3. The domain name (the "right-hand side" of the email address,
called the "domain" in RFC 2822) is appended to the result of
step 2 to complete the prepared domain name.
For example, to request a SMIMEA resource record for a user whose
address is "chris@example.com", you would use
"chris._smimecert.example.com" in the request.
[[ Need to discuss back-quoting, such as for chris.smith@example.com
becoming chris\.smith._smimecert.example.com ]]
4. Use of S/MIME Certificate Associations in S/MIME
[[ Stuff here that sounds like TLSA but is actually about S/MIME
senders and receivers. Lots of text lifted from
draft-ietf-dane-protocol. ]]
5. Mandatory-to-Implement Algorithms
[[ Mostly copied from draft-ietf-dane-protocol. ]]
6. IANA Considerations
[[ Mostly copied from draft-ietf-dane-protocol but using "SMIMEA"
instead. ]]
7. Security Considerations
[[ Mostly copied from draft-ietf-dane-protocol but is actually about
S/MIME senders and receivers. ]]
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8. Acknowledgements
[[ Mostly copied from draft-ietf-dane-protocol ]]
9. References
9.1. Normative References
[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.
[RFC4033] Arends, R., Austein, R., Larson, M., Massey, D., and S.
Rose, "DNS Security Introduction and Requirements",
RFC 4033, March 2005.
[RFC4034] Arends, R., Austein, R., Larson, M., Massey, D., and S.
Rose, "Resource Records for the DNS Security Extensions",
RFC 4034, March 2005.
[RFC4035] Arends, R., Austein, R., Larson, M., Massey, D., and S.
Rose, "Protocol Modifications for the DNS Security
Extensions", RFC 4035, March 2005.
[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.
[RFC5751] Ramsdell, B. and S. Turner, "Secure/Multipurpose Internet
Mail Extensions (S/MIME) Version 3.2 Message
Specification", RFC 5751, January 2010.
9.2. Informative References
[RFC2822] Resnick, P., "Internet Message Format", RFC 2822,
April 2001.
Authors' Addresses
Paul Hoffman
VPN Consortium
Email: paul.hoffman@vpnc.org
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Jakob Schlyter
Kirei AB
Email: jakob@kirei.se
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