IPSEC Working Group                           Ashar Aziz
INTERNET-DRAFT                                Tom Markson
                                              Hemma Prafullchandra
                                              Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Expires in six months                         December 21, 1995





             X.509 Encoding of Diffie-Hellman Public Values
                  <draft-ietf-ipsec-skip-x509-00.txt>



Status of this Memo

This document is a submission to the IETF Internet Protocol Security
(IPSEC) Working Group. Comments are solicited and should be addressed to
to the working group mailing list (ipsec@ans.net) or to the authors.

This document is an Internet-Draft.  Internet Drafts are working
documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and
its working Groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working
documents as Internet Drafts.

Internet-Drafts draft documents are 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."

To learn the current status of any Internet-Draft, please check the
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ftp.isi.edu (US West Coast).

Distribution of this memo is unlimited.









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Abstract

This document describes the ASN.1 [1] encoding of the CCITT 1988 X.509
[2] certificate with Diffie-Hellman public values for use with SKIP [5].












































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                                CONTENTS


    Status of this Memo..................................  1

    Abstract.............................................  2

1.  Encoding of DH public values.........................  3

2.  Encoding of the Distinguished Name (DN)..............  4

3.  Security Considerations..............................  5

    Acknowledgements.....................................  5

    References...........................................  5

    Author's Address(es).................................  6






























                           - i -



INTERNET-DRAFT           SKIP-X509         December 21, 1995



1.  Encoding of DH public values

The X.509 certificate format is defined by the following ASN.1 syntax:

Certificate ::= SIGNED SEQUENCE {
                  version [0]           Version DEFAULT v1988,
                  serialNumber          CertificateSerialNumber,
                  signature             AlgorithmIdentifier,
                  issuer                Name,
                  validity              Validity,
                  subject               Name,
                  subjectPublicKeyInfo  SubjectPublicKeyInfo
                }

Version ::= INTEGER { v1988(0) }

CertificateSerialNumber ::= INTEGER

Validity ::= SEQUENCE {
               notBefore UTCTime,
               notAfter UTCTime
             }

SubjectPublicKeyInfo ::= SEQUENCE {
                           algorithm    AlgorithmIdentifier,
                           subjectPublicKey     BIT STRING
                         }

AlgorithmIdentifier ::= SEQUENCE {
                          algorithm       OBJECT IDENTIFIER,
                          parameters      ANY DEFINED BY algorithm OPTIONAL
                        }


The encoding of a Diffie-Hellman public value in an X.509 certificate
will be in the form of an INTEGER.  The algorithm identifier will be as
defined in PKCS #3 [3].











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Thus,

DHPublicKey ::= INTEGER

AlgorithmIdentifier ::= SEQUENCE {
                          algorithm     OBJECT IDENTIFIER
                          SEQUENCE {
                            prime INTEGER,      -- p
                            base  INTEGER,      -- g
                            privateValueLength INTEGER OPTIONAL
                          }
                        }

with the OBJECT IDENTIFIER value being,

dhKeyAgreement OBJECT IDENTIFIER ::= { iso(1) member-body(2) US(840)
                                        rsadsi(113549) pkcs(1) 3  1 }


The DHPublicKey gets encapsulated as the BIT STRING in
SubjectPublicKeyInfo of an X.509 certificate in the following manner.
First the DHPublicKey is encoded as an INTEGER, and then this INTEGER is
encoded as the payload of the BIT STRING.

The certificate and Certificate Revocation List (CRL) encoding is the
same as in RFC 1422. CRLs can be used with SKIP in accordance with each
site's certificate/CRL management policies.


2.  Encoding of the Distinguished Name (DN)

When the name space is the IP address space, a certificate is allowed to
bind multiple IP addresses to a single public value to accommodate cases
where a single IP node has multiple IP addresses.  The SEQUENCE-OF
construct in a DN readily allows for this.  What is needed is an ASN.1
OBJECT IDENTIFIER for an AttributeType specifying an IP address.












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This is defined here as,

ipAddress ATTRIBUTE
                WITH ATTRIBUTE-SYNTAX
                        PrintableString (SIZE(1 .. ub-ipAddress))
                ::= { 1, 3, 6, 1, 4, 1, 42, 2, 11, 2, 1 }


ub-ipAddress ::= 256

The DN in the certificate can contain multiple of these by iterating on
the SEQUENCE-OF construct of the Relative Distinguished Name Sequence.

The PrintableString contains either the hexadecimal representation or
standard dot notation representation of an IP address.  Note that all
three conventional forms for representing IPv6 addresses [7] as text
strings are allowed by this definition.

When individual users are identified using DNs, then the certificate
naturally contains their DNs.  The SKIP internet draft [5] describes how
DNs may be used with SKIP, by identifying the DN name space using the
Source and destination NSID bytes in the SKIP header.


3.  Security Considerations

Security issues are not discussed in this document.


Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all of the people who helped make this draft
possible.


References

[1] CCITT Recommendation X.208 (1992), "Abstract Syntax Notation One"

[2] CCITT Recommendation X.509 (1988), "The Directory - Authentication
    Framework"

[3] "Public Key Cryptography Standards", PKCS#s 1-11 from RSA Data
    Security Inc., Redwood City, CA, ftp://ftp.rsa.com/pub/pkcs




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[4] Kent, S., "Privacy Enhancement for Internet Electronic Mail:  Part
    II: Certificate-Based Key Management", RFC 1422

[5] Aziz, A., Markson, T., Prafullchandra, H., "Simple Key-management
    for Internet Protocols", (I-D draft-ietf-ipsec-skip-06.txt), Work In
    Progress

[6] "NIST OIW Stable Implementors Workshop", September 1994, Part 12 -
    OS Security

[7] Hinden, R., Deering, S., "IP Version 6 Addressing Architecture",
    (I-D draft-ietf-ipngwg-addr-arch-03.txt), Work In Progress


Author's Address(es)

     Ashar Aziz
     Sun Microsystems, Inc.
     M/S PAL1-550
     2550 Garcia Avenue
     Mountain View, CA 94043

     Email: ashar.aziz@eng.sun.com
     Alternate email address: ashar@incog.com

     Tom Markson
     Sun Microsystems, Inc.
     M/S PAL1-550
     2550 Garcia Avenue
     Mountain View, CA 94043

     Email: markson@incog.com
     Alternate email address: markson@eng.sun.com

     Hemma Prafullchandra
     Sun Microsystems, Inc.
     M/S PAL1-550
     2550 Garcia Avenue
     Mountain View, CA 94043

     Email: hemma@eng.sun.com
     Alternate email address: hemma@incog.com






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