Network Working Group                                           E. Omara
Internet-Draft                                                    Google
Intended status: Informational                             B. Beurdouche
Expires: July 29, 2020                                             INRIA
                                                             E. Rescorla
                                                                 Mozilla
                                                               S. Inguva
                                                                 Twitter
                                                                 A. Kwon
                                                                     MIT
                                                                A. Duric
                                                                    Wire
                                                        January 26, 2020


            The Messaging Layer Security (MLS) Architecture
                     draft-ietf-mls-architecture-04

Abstract

   This document describes the reference architecture, functional and
   security requirements for the Messaging Layer Security (MLS)
   protocol.  MLS provides a security layer for group messaging
   applications with from two to a large number of clients.  It is meant
   to protect against eavesdropping, tampering, and message forgery.

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 https://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 July 29, 2020.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2020 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.




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   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
   Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
   (https://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 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.

Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   2.  General Setting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
     2.1.  Group, Members and Clients  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     2.2.  Authentication Service  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
     2.3.  Delivery Service  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
       2.3.1.  Key Storage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
       2.3.2.  Key Retrieval . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
       2.3.3.  Delivery of messages and attachments  . . . . . . . .   8
       2.3.4.  Membership knowledge  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
       2.3.5.  Membership and offline members  . . . . . . . . . . .  10
   3.  System Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
     3.1.  Functional Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
       3.1.1.  Asynchronous Usage  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
       3.1.2.  Recovery After State Loss . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
       3.1.3.  Support for Multiple Devices  . . . . . . . . . . . .  11
       3.1.4.  Extensibility / Pluggability  . . . . . . . . . . . .  11
       3.1.5.  Privacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  11
       3.1.6.  Federation  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  11
       3.1.7.  Compatibility with future versions of MLS . . . . . .  12
     3.2.  Security Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  12
       3.2.1.  Connections between Clients and Servers (one-to-one)   12
       3.2.2.  Message Secrecy and Authentication  . . . . . . . . .  12
   4.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  15
     4.1.  Transport Security Links  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  15
     4.2.  Delivery Service Compromise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  15
     4.3.  Authentication Service Compromise . . . . . . . . . . . .  16
     4.4.  Client Compromise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  16
   5.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  16
   6.  Contributors  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  16
   7.  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  17
   Authors' Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  18








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1.  Introduction

   RFC EDITOR: PLEASE REMOVE THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH

   The source for this draft is maintained in GitHub.  Suggested changes
   should be submitted as pull requests at https://github.com/mlswg/mls-
   architecture.  Instructions are on that page as well.  Editorial
   changes can be managed in GitHub, but any substantive change should
   be discussed on the MLS mailing list.

   End-to-end security is a requirement for instant messaging systems
   and is commonly deployed in many such systems.  In this context,
   "end-to-end" captures the notion that users of the system enjoy some
   level of security - with the precise level depending on the system
   design - even when the messaging service they are using performs
   unsatisfactorily.

   Messaging Layer Security (MLS) specifies an architecture (this
   document) and an abstract protocol [MLSPROTO] for providing end-to-
   end security in this setting.  MLS is not intended as a full instant
   messaging protocol but rather is intended to be embedded in a
   concrete protocol such as XMPP [RFC6120].  In addition, it does not
   specify a complete wire encoding, but rather a set of abstract data
   structures which can then be mapped onto a variety of concrete
   encodings, such as TLS [I-D.ietf-tls-tls13], CBOR [RFC7049], and JSON
   [RFC7159].  Implementations which adopt compatible encodings will
   have some degree of interoperability at the message level, though
   they may have incompatible identity/authentication infrastructures.
   The MLS protocol has been designed to provide the same security
   guarantees to all users, for all group sizes, even when it reduces to
   only two users.

   This document is intended to describe the overall messaging system
   architecture which the MLS protocol fits into, including the
   operational requirements needed to achieve a functional system, and
   to describe the security goals it is intended to fulfill.

2.  General Setting

   Informally, a group is a set of users who possibly use multiple
   endpoint devices to interact with the Messaging Service (MS).  A
   group may be as small as two members (the simple case of person to
   person messaging) or as large as thousands.

   In order to communicate securely, users initially interact with
   services at their disposal to establish the necessary values and
   credentials required for encryption and authentication.




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   The Messaging Service (MS) presents as two abstract services that
   allow clients to prepare for sending and receiving messages securely:

   o  An Authentication Service (AS) which is responsible for
      maintaining user long term identities, issuing credentials which
      allow them to authenticate each other, and potentially allowing
      users to discover each others long-term identity keys.

   o  A Delivery Service (DS) which is responsible for receiving and
      redistributing messages between group members.  In the case of
      group messaging, the delivery service may also be responsible for
      acting as a "broadcaster" where the sender sends a single message
      to a group which is then forwarded to each recipient in the group
      by the DS.  The DS is also responsible for storing and delivering
      initial public key material required by clients in order to
      proceed with the group secret key establishment process.

         ----------------      --------------
        | Authentication |    | Delivery     |
        | Service (AS)   |    | Service (DS) |
         ----------------      --------------
                            /        |         \            Group
                           / ************************************
                          /  *       |           \              *
               ----------    *   ----------        ----------   *
              | Client 0 |   *  | Member 1 |      | Member N |  *
               ----------    *   ----------        ----------   *
              ............   *  ............      ............  *
              User 0         *  User 0            User 1        *
                             *                                  *
                             ************************************

   In many systems, the AS and the DS are actually operated by the same
   entity and may even be the same server.  However, they are logically
   distinct and, in other systems, may be operated by different
   entities, hence we show them as being separate here.  Other
   partitions are also possible, such as having a separate directory
   server.

   A typical group messaging scenario might look like this:

   1.  Alice, Bob and Charlie create accounts with a messaging service
       and obtain credentials from the AS.

   2.  Alice, Bob and Charlie authenticate to the DS and store some
       initial keying material which can be used to send encrypted
       messages to them for the first time.  This keying material is
       authenticated with their long term credentials.



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   3.  When Alice wants to send a message to Bob and Charlie, she
       contacts the DS and looks up their initial keying material.  She
       uses these keys to establish a new set of keys which she can use
       to send encrypted messages to Bob and Charlie.  She then sends
       the encrypted message(s) to the DS, which forwards them to the
       recipients.

   4.  Bob and/or Charlie respond to Alice's message.  In addtion, they
       might choose to update their key material which provides post-
       compromise security Section 3.2.2.1.  As a consequence of that
       change, the group secrets are updated

   Clients may wish to do the following:

   o  create a group by inviting a set of other clients;

   o  add one or more clients to an existing group;

   o  remove one or more members from an existing group;

   o  update their own key material

   o  join an existing group;

   o  leave a group;

   o  send a message to everyone in the group;

   o  receive a message from someone in the group.

   At the cryptographic level, clients (and by extension members in
   groups) have equal permissions.  For instance, any member can add or
   remove another client in a group.  This is in contrast to some
   designs in which there is a single group controller who can modify
   the group.  MLS is compatible with having group administration
   restricted to certain users, but we assume that those restrictions
   are enforced by authentication and access control at the application
   layer.  Thus, for instance, while it might be cryptographically
   possible for any member to send a message adding a new client to a
   group, the group might have the policy that only certain members are
   allowed to make changes and thus other members can ignore or reject
   such a message from an unauthorized user.

2.1.  Group, Members and Clients

   While informally, a group can be considered to be a set of users
   possibly using multiple endpoint devices to interact with the
   Messaging Service, this definition is too simplistic.



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   Formally, a Client is a set of cryptographic objects composed by
   public values such as a name (an identity), a public encryption key
   and a public signature key.  Ownership of a Client by a user is
   determined by the the fact that the user has knowledge of the
   associated secret values.  When a Client is part of a Group, it is
   called a Member and its signature key pair uniquely defines its
   identity to other clients or members a the Group.  In some messaging
   systems, clients belonging to the same user must all share the same
   identity key pair, but MLS does not assume this.

   Users will typically own multiple Clients, potentially one or more
   per end-user devices (phones, web clients or other devices...) and
   may choose to authenticate using the same signature key across
   devices, using one signature key per device or even one signature key
   per group.

   The formal definition of a Group in MLS is the set of clients that
   have knowledge of the shared group secret established in the group
   key establishment phase of the protocol and have contributed to it.
   Until a Member has contributed to the group secret, other members
   cannot assume she is a member of the group.

2.2.  Authentication Service

   The basic function of the Authentication Service (AS) is to provide a
   trusted mapping from user identities (usernames, phone numbers,
   etc.), to long-term identity keys, which may either be one per Client
   or may be shared amongst the clients attached to a user.

   The Authentication Service (AS) is expected to play multiple roles in
   the architecture:

   o  A certification authority or similar service which signs some sort
      of portable credential binding an identity to a signature key.

   o  A directory server which provides the key for a given identity
      (presumably this connection is secured via some form of transport
      security such as TLS).

   The MLS protocol assumes a signature keypair for authentication of
   messages.  It is important to note that this signature keypair might
   be the identity keypair directly, or a different signature keypair
   for which the the public key has been for example signed by the
   identity private key.  This flexibility allows for multiple
   infrastructure considerations and has the benefit of providing ways
   to use different signature keys across different groups by using
   hierarchical authentication keys.  This flexibility also comes at the
   price of a security tradeoff, described in the security



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   considerations, between potential unlinkability of the signature keys
   across groups and the amount of time required to reinstate
   authentication and secrecy of messages after the compromise of a
   device.

   Ultimately, the only requirement is for the applications to be able
   to check the credential containing the protocol signing key and the
   identity against the Authentication Service at any time.

   By definition, the Authentication Service is invested with a large
   amount of trust.  A malicious AS can impersonate - or allow an
   attacker to impersonate - any user of the system.  As a corrolary, by
   impersonating identities authorized to be members of a group, an AS
   can break confidentiality.

   This risk can be mitigated by publishing the binding between
   identities and keys in a public log such as Key Transparency (KT)
   [KeyTransparency].  It is possible to build a functional MLS system
   without any kind of public key logging, but such a system will
   necessarily be somewhat vulnerable to attack by a malicious or
   untrusted AS.

2.3.  Delivery Service

   The Delivery Service (DS) is expected to play multiple roles in the
   Messaging Service architecture:

   o  To act as a directory service providing the initial keying
      material for clients to use.  This allows a client to establish a
      shared key and send encrypted messages to other clients even if
      the other client is offline.

   o  To route messages between clients and to act as a message
      broadcaster, taking in one message and forwarding it to multiple
      clients (also known as "server side fanout").

   Because the MLS protocol provides a way for Clients to send and
   receive application messages asynchronously, it only provides causal
   ordering of application messages from senders while it has to enforce
   global ordering of group operations to provide Group Agreement.

   Depending on the level of trust given by the group to the Delivery
   Service, the functional and privacy guarantees provided by MLS may
   differ but the Authentication and Confidentiality guarantees remain
   the same.

   Unlike the Authentication Service which is trusted for authentication
   and secrecy, the Delivery Service is completely untrusted regarding



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   this property.  While privacy of group membership might be a problem
   in the case of a DS server fanout, the Delivery Service can be
   considered as an active adaptative network attacker from the point of
   view of the security analysis.

2.3.1.  Key Storage

   Upon joining the system, each client stores its initial cryptographic
   key material with the Delivery Service.  This key material, called
   ClientInitKey, advertizes the functional abilities of the Client such
   as supported protocol versions and extensions and the following
   cryptographic information:

   o  A credential from the Authentication Service attesting to the
      binding between the identity and the client's signature key.

   o  The client's asymmetric encryption key material signed with the
      signature key associated with the credential.

   As noted above, users may own multiple clients, each with their own
   keying material, and thus there may be multiple entries stored by
   each user.

   The Delivery Service is also responsible for allowing users to add,
   remove or update their initial keying material and to ensure that the
   identifier for these keys are unique accross all keys stored on the
   DS.

2.3.2.  Key Retrieval

   When a client wishes to establish a group, it first contacts the DS
   to request a ClientInitKey for each other client, authenticate it
   using the signature keys, and then can use those to form the group.

2.3.3.  Delivery of messages and attachments

   The main responsibility of the Delivery Service is to ensure delivery
   of messages.  Specifically, we assume that DSs provide:

   o  Reliable delivery: when a message is provided to the DS, it is
      eventually delivered to all clients.

   o  In-order delivery: messages are delivered to the group in the
      order they are received by the Delivery Service and in
      approximately the order in which they are sent by clients.  The
      latter is an approximate guarantee because multiple clients may
      send messages at the same time and so the DS needs some latitude
      in enforcing ordering across clients.



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   o  Consistent ordering: the DS must ensure that all clients have the
      same view of message ordering for cryptographically relevant
      operations.  This means that the DS MUST enforce global
      consistency of the ordering of group operation messages.

   Note that the protocol provides three important information within an
   MLSCiphertext message in order to provide ordering:

   o  The Group Identifier (GID) to allow to distinguish the group for
      which the message has been sent;

   o  The Epoch number, which represent the number of changes (version)
      of the group associated with a specific GID, and allows for
      lexicographical ordering of two messages from the same group;

   o  The Content Type of the message, which allows the DS to determine
      the ordering requirement on the message.

   The MLS protocol itself can verify these properties.  For instance,
   if the DS reorders messages from a Client or provides different
   Clients with inconsistent orderings, then Clients can detect this
   misconduct.  However, the protocol relies on the ordering, and on the
   fact that only one honest group operation message is faned-out to
   clients per Epoch, to provide Clients with a consistent view of the
   evolving Group State.

   Note that some forms of DS misbehavior are still possible and
   difficult to detect.  For instance, a DS can simply refuse to relay
   messages to and from a given client.  Without some sort of side
   information, other clients cannot generally distinguish this form of
   Denial of Service (DoS) attack.

2.3.4.  Membership knowledge

   Group membership is itself sensitive information and MLS is designed
   so drastically limit the amount of persisted metadata.  However,
   large groups often require an infrastructure which provides server
   fanout.  In the case of client fanout, the destinations of a message
   is known by all clients, hence the server usually does not need this
   information.  However, they may learn this information through
   traffic analysis.  Unfortunately, in a server side fanout model, the
   DS can learn that a given client is sending the same message to a set
   of other clients.  In addition, there may be applications of MLS in
   which the group membership list is stored on some server associated
   with the MS.

   While this knowledge is not a break of authentication or
   confidentiality, it is a serious issue for privacy.  In the case



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   where metadata has to be persisted for functionality, it SHOULD be
   stored encrypted at rest.

2.3.5.  Membership and offline members

   Because Forward Secrecy (FS) and Post-Compromise Security (PCS) rely
   on the active deletion and replacement of keying material, any client
   which is persistently offline may still be holding old keying
   material and thus be a threat to both FS and PCS if it is later
   compromised.

   MLS cannot inherently defend against this problem, especially in the
   case where the Client hasn't processed messages but MLS-using systems
   can enforce some mechanism to try retaining these properties.
   Typically this will consist of evicting clients which are idle for
   too long, thus containing the threat of compromise.  The precise
   details of such mechanisms are a matter of local policy and beyond
   the scope of this document.

3.  System Requirements

3.1.  Functional Requirements

   MLS is designed as a large scale group messaging protocol and hence
   aims to provide performance and safety to its users.  Messaging
   systems that implement MLS provide support for conversations
   involving two or more members, and aim to scale to groups as large as
   50,000 members, typically including many users using multiple
   devices.

3.1.1.  Asynchronous Usage

   No operation in MLS requires two distinct clients or members to be
   online simultaneously.  In particular, members participating in
   conversations protected using MLS can update shared keys, add or
   remove new members, and send messages and attachments without waiting
   for another user's reply.

   Messaging systems that implement MLS have to provide a transport
   layer for delivering messages asynchronously and reliably.

3.1.2.  Recovery After State Loss

   Conversation participants whose local MLS state is lost or corrupted
   can reinitialize their state and continue participating in the
   conversation.





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   [[OPEN ISSUE: The previous statement seems too strong, establish what
   exact functional requirement we have regarding state recovery.
   Previously: "This may entail some level of message loss, but does not
   result in permanent exclusion from the group."]]

3.1.3.  Support for Multiple Devices

   It is typically expected for users within a Group to own different
   devices.

   A new device can be added to a group and be considered as a new
   client by the protocol.  This client will not gain access to the
   history even if it is owned by someone who owns another member of the
   Group.  Restoring history is typically not allowed at the protocol
   level but applications can elect to provide such a mechanism outside
   of MLS.  Such mechanisms, if used, may undermine the FS and PCS
   guarantees provided by MLS.

3.1.4.  Extensibility / Pluggability

   Messages that do not affect the group state can carry an arbitrary
   payload with the purpose of sharing that payload between group
   members.  No assumptions are made about the format of the payload.

3.1.5.  Privacy

   The protocol is designed in a way that limits the server-side (AS and
   DS) metadata footprint.  The DS only persists data required for the
   delivery of messages and avoid Personally Identifiable Information
   (PII) or other sensitive metadata wherever possible.  A Messaging
   Service provider that has control over both the AS and the DS, will
   not be able to correlate encrypted messages forwarded by the DS, with
   the initial public keys signed by the AS.

   [[OPEN ISSUE: These privacy statements seem very strong.  BB.  I
   would be willing to keep them as requirements since we have example
   solutions in the Server-Assist draft.]]

3.1.6.  Federation

   The protocol aims to be compatible with federated environments.
   While this document does not specify all necessary mechanisms
   required for federation, multiple MLS implementations can
   interoperate to form federated systems if they use compatible
   authentication mechanisms and infrastructure functionalities.






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3.1.7.  Compatibility with future versions of MLS

   It is important that multiple versions of MLS be able to coexist in
   the future.  Thus, MLS offers a version negotiation mechanism; this
   mechanism prevents version downgrade attacks where an attacker would
   actively rewrite messages with a lower protocol version than the ones
   originally offered by the endpoints.  When multiple versions of MLS
   are available, the negotiation protocol guarantees that the version
   agreed upon will be the highest version supported in common by the
   group.

   In MLS 1.0, the creator of the group is responsible for selecting the
   best ciphersuite proposed across clients.  Each client is able to
   verify availability of protocol version, ciphersuites and extensions
   at all times once he has at least received the first group operation
   message.

3.2.  Security Requirements

3.2.1.  Connections between Clients and Servers (one-to-one)

   We assume that all transport connections are secured via some
   transport layer security mechanism such as TLS [I-D.ietf-tls-tls13].
   However, as noted above, the security of MLS will generally survive
   compromise of the transport layer, so long as identity keys provided
   by the AS are authenticated at a minimum.  However, MLS ciphertext
   contain the Group Identifier, Epoch number and Content Type that may
   be use to improve attacks on the privacy of the group.

3.2.2.  Message Secrecy and Authentication

   The trust establishment step of the MLS protocol is followed by a
   conversation protection step where encryption is used by clients to
   transmit authenticated messages to other clients through the DS.
   This ensures that the DS does not have access to the group's private
   content.

   MLS aims to provide secrecy, integrity and authentication for all
   messages.

   Message Secrecy in the context of MLS means that only intended
   recipients (current group members), can read any message sent to the
   group, even in the context of an active attacker as described in the
   threat model.

   Message Integrity and Authentication mean that an honest Client can
   only accept a message if it was sent by a group member and that no




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   Client can send a message which other Clients accept as being from
   another Client.

   A corollary to this statement is that the AS and the DS cannot read
   the content of messages sent between Members as they are not Members
   of the Group.  MLS optionally provides additional protections
   regarding traffic analysis so as to reduce the ability of attackers,
   or a compromised member of the messaging system, to deduce the
   content of the messages depending on (for example) their size.  One
   of these protections includes padding messages in order to produce
   ciphertexts of standard length.  While this protection is highly
   recommended it is not mandatory as it can be costly in terms of
   performance for clients and the MS.

   Message content can be deniable if the signature keys are exchanged
   over a deniable channel prior to signing messages.

3.2.2.1.  Forward and Post-Compromise Security

   MLS provides additional protection regarding secrecy of past messages
   and future messages.  These cryptographic security properties are
   Forward Secrecy (FS) and Post-Compromise Security (PCS).

   FS means that access to all encrypted traffic history combined with
   an access to all current keying material on clients will not defeat
   the secrecy properties of messages older than the oldest key of the
   compromised client.  Note that this means that clients have the
   extremely important role of deleting appropriate keys as soon as they
   have been used with the expected message, otherwise the secrecy of
   the messages and the security for MLS is considerably weakened.

   PCS means that if a group member's state is compromised at some time
   t but the group member subsequently performs an update at some time
   t', then all MLS guarantees apply to messages sent by the member
   after time t', and by other members after they have processed the
   update.  For example, if an attacker learns all secrets known to
   Alice at time t, including both Alice's long-term secret keys and all
   shared group keys, but Alice performs a key update at time t', then
   the attacker is unable to violate any of the MLS security properties
   after the updates have been processed.

   Both of these properties are satisfied even against compromised DSs
   and ASs.








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3.2.2.2.  Membership Changes

   MLS aims to provide agreement on group membership, meaning that all
   group members have agreed on the list of current group members.

   Some applications may wish to enforce ACLs to limit addition or
   removal of group members, to privileged clients or users.  Others may
   wish to require authorization from the current group members or a
   subset thereof.  Regardless, MLS does not allow addition or removal
   of group members without informing all other members.

   Once a client is part of a group, the set of devices controlled by
   the user can only be altered by an authorized member of the group.
   This authorization could depend on the application: some applications
   might want to allow certain other members of the group to add or
   remove devices on behalf of another member, while other applications
   might want a more strict policy and allow only the owner of the
   devices to add or remove them at the potential cost of weaker PCS
   guarantees.

   Members who are removed from a group do not enjoy special privileges:
   compromise of a removed group member does not affect the security of
   messages sent after their removal but might affect previous messages
   if the group secrets have not been deleted properly.

3.2.2.3.  Parallel Groups

   Any user may have membership in several Groups simultaneously.  The
   set of members of any group may or may not form a subset of the
   members of another group.  MLS guarantees that the FS and PCS goals
   are maintained and not weakened by user membership in multiple
   groups.

3.2.2.4.  Security of Attachments

   The security properties expected for attachments in the MLS protocol
   are very similar to the ones expected from messages.  The distinction
   between messages and attachments stems from the fact that the typical
   average time between the download of a message and the one from the
   attachments may be different.  For many reasons (a typical reason
   being the lack of high bandwidth network connectivity), the lifetime
   of the cryptographic keys for attachments is usually higher than for
   messages, hence slightly weakening the PCS guarantees for
   attachments.







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3.2.2.5.  Denial of Service

   In general we do not consider Denial of Service (DoS) resistance to
   be the responsibility of the protocol.  However, it should not be
   possible for anyone aside from the DS to perform a trivial DoS attack
   from which it is hard to recover.

3.2.2.6.  Non-Repudiation vs Deniability

   As described in Section 4.4, MLS provides strong authentication
   within a group, such that a group member cannot send a message that
   appears to be from another group member.  Additionally, some services
   require that a recipient be able to prove to the messaging service
   that a message was sent by a given client, in order to report abuse.
   MLS supports both of these use cases.  In some deployments, these
   services are provided by mechanisms which allow the receiver to prove
   a message's origin to a third party (this if often called "non-
   repudiation"), but it should also be possible to operate MLS in a
   "deniable" mode where such proof is not possible.  [[OPEN ISSUE:
   Exactly how to supply this is still a protocol question.]]

4.  Security Considerations

   MLS adopts the Internet threat model [RFC3552] and therefore assumes
   that the attacker has complete control of the network.  It is
   intended to provide the security services described in the face of
   such attackers.  In addition, these guarantees are intended to
   degrade gracefully in the presence of compromise of the transport
   security links as well as of both Clients and elements of the
   messaging system, as described in the remainder of this section.

4.1.  Transport Security Links

   [TODO: Mostly DoS, message suppression, and leakage of group
   membership.]

4.2.  Delivery Service Compromise

   MLS is intended to provide strong guarantees in the face of
   compromise of the DS.  Even a totally compromised DS should not be
   able to read messages or inject messages that will be acceptable to
   legitimate clients.  It should also not be able to undetectably
   remove, reorder or replay messages.

   However, a DS can mount a variety of DoS attacks on the system,
   including total DoS attacks (where it simply refuses to forward any
   messages) and partial DoS attacks (where it refuses to forward
   messages to and from specific clients).  As noted in Section 2.3.3,



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   these attacks are only partially detectable by clients without an
   out-of-band channel.  Ultimately, failure of the DS to provide
   reasonable service must be dealt with as a customer service matter,
   not via technology.

   Because the DS is responsible for providing the initial keying
   material to clients, it can provide stale keys.  This does not
   inherently lead to compromise of the message stream, but does allow
   it to attack forward security to a limited extent.  This threat can
   be mitigated by having initial keys expire.

4.3.  Authentication Service Compromise

   A compromised AS is a serious matter, as the AS can provide incorrect
   or attacker-provided identities to clients.  As noted in Section 2.2,
   detecting this form of attack requires some sort of transparency/
   logging mechanism.  Without such a mechanism, MLS cannot detect a
   compromised AS.

4.4.  Client Compromise

   MLS provides a limited form of protection against compromised Clients
   through PCS.  When the Client is fully compromised, then the attacker
   will be able to decrypt any messages for groups in which the Client
   is a member, and will be able to send messages impersonating the
   compromised Client.  However, if the Client afterwards updates its
   keying material (see Section 3.2.2.1) (using fresh randomness that
   the attacker does not know) then the PCS property enables the Client
   to recover.

   In addition, a client cannot send a message to a group which appears
   to be from another client with a different identity.  Note that if
   devices from the same user share keying material, then one will be
   able to impersonate another.

   Finally, clients should not be able to perform DoS attacks
   Section 3.2.2.5.

5.  IANA Considerations

   This document makes no requests of IANA.

6.  Contributors

   o  Katriel Cohn-Gordon
      University of Oxford
      me@katriel.co.uk




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   o  Cas Cremers
      University of Oxford
      cas.cremers@cs.ox.ac.uk

   o  Thyla van der Merwe
      Royal Holloway, University of London
      thyla.van.der@merwe.tech

   o  Jon Millican
      Facebook
      jmillican@fb.com

   o  Raphael Robert
      Wire
      raphael@wire.com

7.  Informative References

   [I-D.ietf-tls-tls13]
              Rescorla, E., "The Transport Layer Security (TLS) Protocol
              Version 1.3", draft-ietf-tls-tls13-28 (work in progress),
              March 2018.

   [KeyTransparency]
              Google, ., "Key Transparency", n.d.,
              <https://KeyTransparency.org>.

   [MLSPROTO]
              Barnes, R., Beurdouche, B., Millican, J., Omara, E., Cohn-
              Gordon, K., and R. Robert, "Messaging Layer Security
              Protocol", 2018.

   [RFC3552]  Rescorla, E. and B. Korver, "Guidelines for Writing RFC
              Text on Security Considerations", BCP 72, RFC 3552,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC3552, July 2003,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3552>.

   [RFC6120]  Saint-Andre, P., "Extensible Messaging and Presence
              Protocol (XMPP): Core", RFC 6120, DOI 10.17487/RFC6120,
              March 2011, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6120>.

   [RFC7049]  Bormann, C. and P. Hoffman, "Concise Binary Object
              Representation (CBOR)", RFC 7049, DOI 10.17487/RFC7049,
              October 2013, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7049>.

   [RFC7159]  Bray, T., Ed., "The JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) Data
              Interchange Format", RFC 7159, DOI 10.17487/RFC7159, March
              2014, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7159>.



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Authors' Addresses

   Emad Omara
   Google

   Email: emadomara@google.com


   Benjamin Beurdouche
   INRIA

   Email: benjamin.beurdouche@inria.fr


   Eric Rescorla
   Mozilla

   Email: ekr@rtfm.com


   Srinivas Inguva
   Twitter

   Email: singuva@twitter.com


   Albert Kwon
   MIT

   Email: kwonal@mit.edu


   Alan Duric
   Wire

   Email: alan@wire.com















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