Network Working Group P. Wouters
Internet-Draft Red Hat
Intended status: Standards Track April 01, 2015
Expires: October 03, 2015
Using DANE to Associate OpenPGP public keys with email addresses
draft-ietf-dane-openpgpkey-03
Abstract
OpenPGP is a message format for email (and file) encryption that
lacks a standardized lookup mechanism to securely obtain OpenPGP
public keys. This document specifies a method for publishing,
locating and verifying OpenPGP public keys in DNS for a specific
email address using a new OPENPGPKEY DNS Resource Record. Security
is provided via DNSSEC.
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
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 October 03, 2015.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2015 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
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(http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.1. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2. The OPENPGPKEY Resource Record . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.1. The OPENPGPKEY RDATA component . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.2. The OPENPGPKEY RDATA wire format . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.3. The OPENPGPKEY RDATA presentation format . . . . . . . . 4
3. Location of the OPENPGPKEY record . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.1. Email address variants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
4. Application use of OPENPGPKEY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4.1. Obtaining an OpenPGP key for a specific email address . . 6
4.2. Confirming the validity of an OpenPGP key . . . . . . . . 6
4.3. Verifying an unknown OpenPGP signature . . . . . . . . . 6
5. OpenPGP Key size and DNS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
6. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
6.1. Response size . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
6.2. Email address information leak . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
6.3. Storage of OPENPGPKEY data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
6.4. Forward security of OpenPGP versus DNSSEC . . . . . . . . 8
7. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
7.1. OPENPGPKEY RRtype . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
8. Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
9. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
9.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
9.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Appendix A. Generating OPENPGPKEY records . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1. Introduction
OpenPGP [RFC4880] public keys are used to encrypt or sign email
messages and files. To encrypt an email message, the sender's email
client or MTA needs to know where to find the recipient's OpenPGP
public key. Once obtained, it needs to find some proof that the
OpenPGP public key found actually belongs to the intended recipient.
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Similarly, when files on a storage media are signed with an OpenPGP
public key that is included on the storage media, this key needs to
be independently verified.
Obtaining and verifying an OpenPGP public key is not a
straightforward process as there are no trusted standardized
locations for publishing OpenPGP public keys indexed by email
address. Instead, OpenPGP clients rely on "well-known key servers"
that are accessed using the HTTP Keyserver Protocol ("HKP") or
manually by users using a variety of differently formatted front-end
web pages. Worse, some OpenPGP users announce their OpenPGP public
key fingerprint on social media with no method of validation
whatsoever.
Currently deployed key servers have no method of validating any
uploaded OpenPGP public key. The key servers simply store and
publish. Anyone can add public keys with any identities and anyone
can add signatures to any other public key using forged malicious
identities. Furthermore, once uploaded, public keys cannot be
deleted. People who did not pre-sign a key revocation can never
remove their public key from these key servers once they lose their
private key.
The lack of a secure means to look up a public key for an email
address prevents email clients and MUAs from encrypting an outgoing
email to the target recipient, forcing the software to send the
message unencrypted. Currently deployed MTAs only support encrypting
the transport of the email, not the email contents itself, leaving
the content of the email exposed to anyone with access to any of the
mail or storage servers used to transport the email from the sender
to the receiver.
This document describes a mechanism to associate a user's OpenPGP
public key with their email address, using a new DNS RRtype.
The proposed new DNS Resource Record type is secured using DNSSEC.
This trust model is not meant to replace the Trust Signature model.
However, it can be used to encrypt a message that would otherwise
have to be sent out unencrypted, where it could be monitored by a
third party in transit or located in plaintext on a storage or email
server. This method can also be used to obtain the OpenPGP public
key which can then be used for manual verification.
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1.1. Terminology
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].
This document also makes use of standard DNSSEC and DANE terminology.
See DNSSEC [RFC4033], [RFC4034], [RFC4035], and DANE [RFC6698] for
these terms.
2. The OPENPGPKEY Resource Record
The OPENPGPKEY DNS resource record (RR) is used to associate an end
entity OpenPGP public key with an email address, thus forming a
"OpenPGP public key association".
The type value allocated for the OPENPGPKEY RR type is 61. The
OPENPGPKEY RR is class independent. The OPENPGPKEY RR has no special
TTL requirements.
2.1. The OPENPGPKEY RDATA component
The RDATA portion of an OPENPGPKEY Resource Record contains a single
value consisting of a [RFC4880] formatted OpenPGP public keyring.
2.2. The OPENPGPKEY RDATA wire format
The RDATA Wire Format consists of a single OpenPGP public key as
defined in Section 5.5.1.1 of [RFC4880]. Note that this format is
without ASCII armor or base64 encoding.
2.3. The OPENPGPKEY RDATA presentation format
The RDATA Presentation Format, as visible in textual zone files,
consists of a single OpenPGP public key as defined in
Section 5.5.1.1. of [RFC4880] encoded in base64 as defined in
Section 4 of [RFC4648].
3. Location of the OPENPGPKEY record
The DNS does not allow the use of all characters that are supported
in the "local-part" of email addresses as defined in [RFC2822] and
[RFC6530]. Therefore, email addresses are mapped into DNS using the
following method:
o The user name (the "left-hand side" of the email address, called
the "local-part" in the mail message format definition [RFC2822]
and the "local part" in the specification for internationalized
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email [RFC6530]) should already be encoded in UTF-8 (or its subset
ASCII). If it is written in another encoding it should be
converted to UTF-8. Next, it is turned into lowercase and hashed
using the SHA2-256 [RFC5754] algorithm, with the hash truncated to
28 octets and represented in its hexadecimal representation, to
become the left-most label in the prepared domain name.
Truncation comes from the right-most octets. This does not
include the at symbol ("@") that separates the left and right
sides of the email address.
o The string "_openpgpkey" becomes the second left-most label in the
prepared domain name.
o 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 an OPENPGPKEY resource record for a user
whose email address is "hugh@example.com", an OPENPGPKEY query would
be placed for the following QNAME: "c93f1e400f26708f98cb19d936620da35
eec8f72e57f9eec01c1afd6._openpgpkey.example.com". The corresponding
RR in the example.com zone might look like (key shortened for
formatting):
c9[..]d6._openpgpkey.example.com. IN OPENPGPKEY <base64 public key>
3.1. Email address variants
Mail systems usually handle variant forms of local-parts. The most
common variants are upper and lower case, which are now invariably
treated as equivalent. But many other variants are possible. Some
systems allow and ignore "noise" characters such as dots, so local
parts johnsmith and John.Smith would be equivalent. Many systems
allow "extensions" such as john-ext or mary+ext where john or mary is
treated as the effective local-part, and the ext is passed to the
recipient for further handling. This can complicate finding the
OPENPGPKEY record associated with the dynamically created email
address.
[RFC5321] and its predecessors have always made it clear that only
the recipient MTA is allowed to interpret the local-part of an
address. A client supporting OPENPGPKEY therefor MUST NOT perform
any kind of mapping rules based on the email address. As the local-
part is converted to lowercase before hashing, case sensitivity will
not cause problems for the OPENPGPKEY lookup.
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4. Application use of OPENPGPKEY
The OPENPGPKEY record allows an application or service to obtain or
verify an OpenPGP public key. The lookup result MUST pass DNSSEC
validation; if validation reaches any state other than "Secure", the
verification MUST be treated as a failure.
4.1. Obtaining an OpenPGP key for a specific email address
If no OpenPGP public keys are known for an email address, an
OPENPGPKEY lookup can be performed to discover the OpenPGP public key
that belongs to a specific email address. This public key can then
be used to verify a received signed message or can be used to send
out an encrypted email message.
4.2. Confirming the validity of an OpenPGP key
Locally stored OpenPGP public keys are not automatically refreshed.
If the owner of that key creates a new OpenPGP public key, that owner
is unable to securely notify all users and applications that have its
old OpenPGP public key. Applications and users can perform an
OPENPGPKEY lookup to confirm the locally stored OpenPGP public key is
still the correct key to use. If verifying a locally stored OpenPGP
public key and the OpenPGP public key found through DNS is different
from the locally stored OpenPGP public key, the verification MUST be
treated as a failure. An application that can interact with the user
MAY ask the user for guidance.
4.3. Verifying an unknown OpenPGP signature
Storage media can be signed using an OpenPGP public key. Even if the
OpenPGP public key is included on the storage media, it needs to be
independently validated. OpenPGP public keys contain one or more IDs
than can have the syntax of an email address. An application can
perform a lookup for an OPENPGPKEY at the expected location for the
specific email address to confirm the validity of the OpenPGP public
key. Once the key has been validated, all files on the storage media
that have been signed by this key can now be verified.
5. OpenPGP Key size and DNS
Due to the expected size of the OPENPGPKEY record, it is recommended
to perform DNS queries for the OPENPGPKEY record using TCP, not UDP.
Although the reliability of the transport of large DNS Resource
Records has improved in the last years, it is still recommended to
keep the DNS records as small as possible without sacrificing the
security properties of the public key. The algorithm type and key
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size of OpenPGP keys should not be modified to accommodate this
section.
OpenPGP supports various attributes that do not contribute to the
security of a key, such as an embedded image file. It is recommended
that these properties are not exported to OpenPGP public keyrings
that are used to create OPENPGPKEY Resource Records. Some OpenPGP
software, for example GnuPG, have support for a "minimal key export"
that is well suited to use as OPENPGPKEY RDATA. See Appendix A.
6. Security Considerations
OPENPGPKEY usage considerations are published in [OPENPGPKEY-USAGE].
6.1. Response size
To prevent amplification attacks, an Authoritative DNS server MAY
wish to prevent returning OPENPGPKEY records over UDP unless the
source IP address has been verified with [DNS-COOKIES]. Such servers
MUST NOT return REFUSED, but answer the query with an empty Answer
Section and the truncation flag set ("TC=1").
6.2. Email address information leak
Email addresses are not secret. Using them causes their publication.
The hashing of the user name in this document is not a security
feature. Publishing OPENPGPKEY records however, will create a list
of hashes of valid email addresses, which could simplify obtaining a
list of valid email addresses for a particular domain. It is
desirable to not ease the harvesting of email addresses where
possible.
The domain name part of the email address is not used as part of the
hash so that hashes can be used in multiple zones deployed using
DNAME [RFC6672]. This does makes it slightly easier and cheaper to
brute-force the SHA2-224 hashes into common and short user names, as
single rainbow tables can be re-used across domains. This can be
somewhat countered by using NSEC3.
DNS zones that are signed with DNSSEC using NSEC for denial of
existence are susceptible to zone-walking, a mechanism that allows
someone to enumerate all the OPENPGPKEY hashes in a zone. This can
be used in combination with previously hashed common or short user
names (in rainbow tables) to deduce valid email addresses. DNSSEC-
signed zones using NSEC3 for denial of existence instead of NSEC are
significantly harder to brute-force after performing a zone-walk.
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6.3. Storage of OPENPGPKEY data
Users may have a local key store with OpenPGP public keys. An
application supporting the use of OPENPGPKEY DNS records MUST NOT
modify the local key store without explicit confirmation of the user,
as the application is unaware of the user's personal policy for
adding, removing or updating their local key store. An application
MAY warn the user if an OPENPGPKEY record does not match the OpenPGP
public key in the local key store.
OpenPGP public keys obtained via OPENPGPKEY records should not be
stored beyond their DNS TTL value.
6.4. Forward security of OpenPGP versus DNSSEC
DNSSEC key sizes are chosen based on the fact that these keys can be
rolled with next to no requirement for security in the future. If
one doubts the strength or security of the DNSSEC key for whatever
reason, one simply rolls to a new DNSSEC key with a stronger
algorithm or larger key size. On the other hand, OpenPGP key sizes
are chosen based on how many years (or decades) their encryption
should remain unbreakable by adversaries that own large scale
computational resources.
This effectively means that anyone who can obtain a DNSSEC private
key of a domain name via coercion, theft or brute force calculations,
can replace any OPENPGPKEY record in that zone and all of the
delegated child zones, irrespective of the key size of the OpenPGP
keypair. Any future messages encrypted with the malicious OpenPGP
key could then be read.
Therefore, an OpenPGP key obtained via an OPENPGPKEY record can only
be trusted as much as the DNS domain can be trusted, and is no
substitute for in-person key verification of the "Web of Trust". See
[OPENPGPKEY-USAGE] for more in-depth information on safe usage of
OPENPGPKEY based OpenPGP keys.
7. IANA Considerations
7.1. OPENPGPKEY RRtype
This document uses a new DNS RR type, OPENPGPKEY, whose value 61 has
been allocated by IANA from the Resource Record (RR) TYPEs
subregistry of the Domain Name System (DNS) Parameters registry.
8. Acknowledgments
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This document is based on RFC-4255 and draft-ietf-dane-smime whose
authors are Paul Hoffman, Jacob Schlyter and W. Griffin. Olafur
Gudmundsson provided feedback and suggested various improvements.
Willem Toorop contributed the gpg and hexdump command options. Edwin
Taylor contributed language improvements for various iterations of
this document. Text regarding email mappings was taken from draft-
levine-dns-mailbox whose author is John Levine.
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.
[RFC4648] Josefsson, S., "The Base16, Base32, and Base64 Data
Encodings", RFC 4648, October 2006.
[RFC4880] Callas, J., Donnerhacke, L., Finney, H., Shaw, D., and R.
Thayer, "OpenPGP Message Format", RFC 4880, November 2007.
[RFC5754] Turner, S., "Using SHA2 Algorithms with Cryptographic
Message Syntax", RFC 5754, January 2010.
9.2. Informative References
[DNS-COOKIES]
Eastlake, Donald., "Domain Name System (DNS) Cookies",
draft-ietf-dnsop-cookies (work in progress), February
2015.
[OPENPGPKEY-USAGE]
Wouters, P., "Usage considerations with the DNS OPENPGPKEY
record", draft-dane-openpgpkey-usage (work in progress),
October 2014.
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[RFC2181] Elz, R. and R. Bush, "Clarifications to the DNS
Specification", RFC 2181, July 1997.
[RFC2822] Resnick, P., "Internet Message Format", RFC 2822, April
2001.
[RFC3597] Gustafsson, A., "Handling of Unknown DNS Resource Record
(RR) Types", RFC 3597, September 2003.
[RFC5233] Murchison, K., "Sieve Email Filtering: Subaddress
Extension", RFC 5233, January 2008.
[RFC5321] Klensin, J., "Simple Mail Transfer Protocol", RFC 5321,
October 2008.
[RFC6530] Klensin, J. and Y. Ko, "Overview and Framework for
Internationalized Email", RFC 6530, February 2012.
[RFC6672] Rose, S. and W. Wijngaards, "DNAME Redirection in the
DNS", RFC 6672, June 2012.
[RFC6698] Hoffman, P. and J. Schlyter, "The DNS-Based Authentication
of Named Entities (DANE) Transport Layer Security (TLS)
Protocol: TLSA", RFC 6698, August 2012.
[RFC7129] Gieben, R. and W. Mekking, "Authenticated Denial of
Existence in the DNS", RFC 7129, February 2014.
Appendix A. Generating OPENPGPKEY records
The commonly available GnuPG software can be used to generate the
RRdata portion of an OPENPGPKEY record:
gpg --export --export-options export-minimal \
hugh@example.com | base64
The --armor or -a option of the gpg command should NOT be used, as it
adds additional markers around the armored key.
When DNS software reading or signing the zone file does not yet
support the OPENPGPKEY RRtype, the Generic Record Syntax of [RFC3597]
can be used to generate the RDATA. One needs to calculate the number
of octets and the actual data in hexadecimal:
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gpg --export --export-options export-minimal \
hugh@example.com | wc -c
gpg --export --export-options export-minimal \
hugh@example.com | hexdump -e \
'"\t" /1 "%.2x"' -e '/32 "\n"'
These values can then be used to generate a generic record (line
break has been added for formatting):
<SHA2-256-trunc(hugh)>._openpgpkey.example.com. IN TYPE61 \# \
<numOctets> <keydata in hex>
The openpgpkey command in the hash-slinger software can be used to
generate complete OPENPGPKEY records
~> openpgpkey --output rfc hugh@example.com
c9[..]d6._openpgpkey.example.com. IN OPENPGPKEY mQCNAzIG[...]
~> openpgpkey --output generic hugh@example.com
c9[..]d6._openpgpkey.example.com. IN TYPE61 \# 2313 99008d03[...]
Author's Address
Paul Wouters
Red Hat
Email: pwouters@redhat.com
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