ACE Working Group                                                S. Raza
Internet-Draft                                               J. Hoeglund
Intended status: Standards Track                                 RISE AB
Expires: December 26, 2019                                   G. Selander
                                                             J. Mattsson
                                                             Ericsson AB
                                                              M. Furuhed
                                                             Nexus Group
                                                           June 24, 2019


                   CBOR Profile of X.509 Certificates
                  draft-raza-ace-cbor-certificates-02

Abstract

   This document specifies a CBOR encoding and profiling of X.509 public
   key certificate suitable for Internet of Things (IoT) deployments.
   The full X.509 public key certificate format and commonly used ASN.1
   encoding is overly verbose for constrained IoT environments.
   Profiling together with CBOR encoding reduces the certificate size
   significantly with associated known performance benefits.

   The CBOR certificates are compatible with the existing X.509
   standard, enabling the use of profiled and compressed X.509
   certificates without modifications in the existing X.509 standard.

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 December 26, 2019.








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Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2019 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
   (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  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   2.  X.509 Certificate Profile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
   3.  CBOR Encoding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   4.  Deployment settings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
   5.  Expected Certificate Sizes  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   6.  Native CBOR Certificates  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
   7.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
   8.  Privacy Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
   9.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
   10. References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
     10.1.  Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
     10.2.  Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
   Appendix A.  CBOR Certificate, CDDL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
   Appendix B.  X.509 Certificate Profile, ASN.1 . . . . . . . . . .  10
   Appendix C.  Certificate Example  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  12
   Authors' Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  13

1.  Introduction

   One of the challenges with deploying a Public Key Infrastructure
   (PKI) for the Internet of Things (IoT) is the size and encoding of
   X.509 public key certificates, since those are not optimized for
   constrained environments [RFC7228].  More compact certificate
   representations are desirable.  Due to the current PKI usage of X.509
   certificates, keeping X.509 compatibility is necessary at least for a
   transition period.  However, the use of a more compact encoding with
   the Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR)
   [I-D.ietf-cbor-7049bis] reduces the certificate size significantly
   which has known performance benefits in terms of decreased
   communication overhead, power consumption, latency, storage, etc.




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   CBOR is a data format designed for small code size and small message
   size.  CBOR builds on the JSON data model but extends it by e.g.
   encoding binary data directly without base64 conversion.  In addition
   to the binary CBOR encoding, CBOR also has a diagnostic notation that
   is readable and editable by humans.  The Concise Data Definition
   Language (CDDL) [RFC8610] provides a way to express structures for
   protocol messages and APIs that use CBOR.  [RFC8610] also extends the
   diagnostic notation.

   CBOR data items are encoded to or decoded from byte strings using a
   type-length-value encoding scheme, where the three highest order bits
   of the initial byte contain information about the major type.  CBOR
   supports several different types of data items, in addition to
   integers (int, uint), simple values (e.g. null), byte strings (bstr),
   and text strings (tstr), CBOR also supports arrays of data items and
   maps of pairs of data items.  For a complete specification and
   examples, see [I-D.ietf-cbor-7049bis] and [RFC8610].

   This document specifies the CBOR certificate profile, which is a CBOR
   based encoding and compression of the X.509 certificate format.  The
   profile is based on previous work on profiling of X.509 certificates
   for Internet of Things deployments [X.509-IoT] which retains
   backwards compatibility with X.509, and can be applied for
   lightweight certificate based authentication with e.g.  DTLS
   [RFC6347] or EDHOC [I-D.selander-ace-cose-ecdhe].  The same profile
   can be used for "native" CBOR encoded certificates, which further
   optimizes the performance in constrained environments but are not
   backwards compatible with X.509, see Section 6.

   Other work has looked at reducing size of X.509 certificates.  The
   purpose of this document is to stimulate a discussion on CBOR based
   certificates.  Further optimizations of this profile are known and
   will be included in future versions.

   o  Terminology {#terminology}

   The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and
   "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP
   14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all
   capitals, as shown here.

   This specification makes use of the terminology in [RFC7228].








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2.  X.509 Certificate Profile

   This profile is inspired by [RFC7925] and mandates further
   restrictions to enable reduction of certificate size.  In this
   section we list the required fields in an X.509 certificate needed by
   devices in IoT deployments.  The corresponding ASN.1 schema is given
   in Appendix B.

   In order to comply with this certificate profile, the following
   restrictions MUST be applied:

   o  Version number.  The X.509 standard has not moved beyond version 3
      since 2008.  With the introduction of certificate extensions new
      certificate fields can be added without breaking the format,
      making version changes less likely.  Therefore this profile fixes
      the version number to 3.

   o  Serial number.  The serial number together with the identity of
      the CA is the unique identifier of a certificate.  The serial
      number MUST be an unsigned integer.

   o  Signature algorithm.  For the CBOR profile, the signature
      algorithm is by default assumed to be ECDSA with SHA256.

   o  Issuer.  Used to identify the issuing CA through a sequence of
      name-value pairs.  This profile is restricting this to one pair,
      common name and associated string value.  The common name MUST
      uniquely identify the CA.  Other fields MUST NOT be used.

   o  Validity.  The following representation MUST be used: UTCTime-
      format, YYMMDDhhmmss.  This is the most compact format allowed by
      the X.509 standard.

   o  Subject.  The subject section has the same format as the issuer,
      identifying the receiver of the public key through a sequence of
      name-value pairs.  This sequence is in the profile restricted to a
      single pair, subject name and associated (unique) value.  For an
      IoT-device, the MAC-derived EUI-64 serves this purpose well.

   o  Subject public key info.  For the IoT devices, elliptic curve
      cryptography based algorithms have clear advantages.  For the IoT
      profile the public key algorithm is by default assumed to be
      prime256v1.

   o  Issuer Unique ID and Subject Unique ID.  These fields are optional
      in X.509 and MUST NOT be used with the CBOR profile.





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   o  Extensions.  Extensions consist of three parts; an OID, a boolean
      telling if it is critical or not, and the value.  To maintain
      forward compatibility, the CBOR profile does not restrict the use
      of extensions.  By the X.509-standard, any device must be able to
      process eight extensions types.  Since only four of them are
      critical for IoT, this profile is making the other four optional.
      Still mandatory to be understood are:

      *  Key Usage

      *  Subject Alternative Name

      *  Basic Constraints

      *  Extended Key Usage

   o  Certificate signature algorithm.  This field duplicates the info
      present in the signature algorithm field.  By default assumed to
      be ECDSA with SHA256.

   o  Certificate Signature.  The field corresponds to the signature
      done by the CA private key.  For the CBOR profile, this is
      restricted to ECDSA type signatures with a signature length of 64
      bits.

3.  CBOR Encoding

   This section specifies the CBOR certificates, which are the result of
   the CBOR encoding and lossless compression of the X.509 certificate
   profile of the previous section.  The CDDL representation is given in
   Appendix A.

   The encoding and compression has several components including: ASN.1
   and base64 encoding is replaced with CBOR encoding, static fields are
   elided, and compression of elliptic curve points.  The field
   encodings and associated savings are listed below.  Combining these
   different components reduces the certificate size significantly, see
   Figure 1.

   o  Version number.  The version number field is omitted in the
      encoding.  This saves 5 bytes.

   o  Serial number.  The serial number is encoded as an unsigned
      integer.  Encoding overhead is reduced by one byte.

   o  Signature algorithm.  If the signature algorithm is the default it
      is omitted in the encoding, otherwise encoded as a one byte COSE
      identifier.  This saves 11 or 12 bytes.



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   o  Issuer.  Since the profile only allows the common name type, the
      common name type specifier is omitted.  In total, the issuer field
      encoding overhead goes from 13 bytes to one byte.

   o  Validity.  The time is encoded as UnixTime in integer format.  The
      validity is represented as a 'not before'-'not after' pair of
      integer.  This reduces the size from 32 to 11 bytes.

   o  Subject.  An IoT subject is identified by a EUI-64, in turn based
      on a 48bit unique MAC id.  This is encoded using only 7 bytes
      using CBOR.  This is a reduction down from 36 bytes for the
      corresponding ASN.1 encoding.

   o  Subject public key info.  If the algorithm identifier is the
      default, it is omitted, otherwise encoded as a one byte COSE
      identifier.  For the allowed ECC type keys, one of the public key
      ECC curve point elements can be calculated from the other, hence
      only one of the curve points is needed (point compression, see
      [PointCompression]).  These actions together, for the default
      algorithm, reduce size from 91 to 35 bytes.

   o  Extensions.  Minor savings are achieved by the compact CBOR
      encoding.  In addition, the relevant X.509 extension OIDs always
      start with 0x551D, hence these two bytes can be omitted.

   o  Certificate signature algorithm.  This algorithm field is always
      the same as the above signature algorithm, and is omitted in the
      encoding.

   o  Signature.  Since the signature algorithm and resulting signature
      length are known, padding and extra length fields which are
      present in the ASN.1 encoding are omitted.  The overhead for
      encoding the 64-bit signature value is reduced from 11 to 2 bytes.

4.  Deployment settings

   CBOR certificates can be deployed with legacy X.509 certificates and
   CA infrastructure.  In order to verify the signature, the CBOR
   certificate is used to recreate the original X.509 data structure to
   be able to verify the signature.

   For the currently used DTLS v1.2 protocol, where the handshake is
   sent unencrypted, the actual encoding and compression can be done at
   different locations depending on the deployment setting.  For
   example, the mapping between CBOR certificate and standard X.509
   certificate can take place in a 6LoWPAN border gateway which allows
   the server side to stay unmodified.  This case gives the advantage of
   the low overhead of a CBOR certificate over a constrained wireless



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   links.  The conversion to X.509 within an IoT device will incur a
   computational overhead, however, this is negligible compared to the
   reduced communication overhead.

   For the setting with constrained server and server-only
   authentication, the server only needs to be provisioned with the CBOR
   certificate and does not perform the conversion to X.509.  This
   option is viable when client authentication can be asserted by other
   means.

   For DTLS v1.3, because certificates are encrypted, the proposed
   encoding needs to be done fully end-to-end, through adding the
   encoding/decoding functionality to the server.  A new certificate
   format or new certificate compression scheme needs to be added.
   While that requires changes on the server side, we believe it to be
   in line with other proposals utilizing cbor encoding for
   communication with resource constrained devices.

5.  Expected Certificate Sizes

   The profiling size saving mainly comes from enforcing removal of
   issuer and subject info fields besides the common name.  The encoding
   savings are presented above in Section 3, for a sample certificate
   given in Appendix C resulting in the numbers shown in Figure 1.

   After profiling, all duplicated information has been removed, and
   remaining text strings are minimal in size.  Therefore no further
   size reduction can be reached with general compression mechanisms.
   (In practice the size might even grow slightly due to the compression
   encoding information, as illustrated in the table below.)

    +---------------------------------------------------+
    |                   | X.509 Profiled | CBOR Encoded |
    +---------------------------------------------------+
    | Certificate Size  |      313       |     144      |
    +---------------------------------------------------+

    +-----------------------------------------------------------------+
    |                   | X.509 Profiled | CBOR Encoded |    Zlib     |
    +-----------------------------------------------------------------+
    | Certificate Size  |      313       |     144      |     319     |
    +-----------------------------------------------------------------+


             Figure 1: Comparing Sizes of Certificates (bytes)






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6.  Native CBOR Certificates

   Further performance improvements can be achieved with the use of
   native CBOR certificates.  In this case the signature is calculated
   over the CBOR encoded structure rather than the ASN.1 encoded
   structure.  This removes entirely the need for ASN.1 and reduces the
   processing in the authenticating devices.

   This solution applies when the devices are only required to
   authenticate with a set of native CBOR certificate compatible
   servers, which may become a preferred approach for future
   deployments.  The mapping between X.509 and CBOR certificates enables
   a migration path between the backwards compatible format and the
   fully optimized format.

7.  Security Considerations

   The CBOR profiling of X.509 certificates does not change the security
   assumptions needed when deploying standard X.509 certificates but
   decreases the number of fields transmitted, which reduces the risk
   for implementation errors.

   Conversion between the certificate formats can be made in constant
   time to reduce risk of information leakage through side channels.

   The current version of the format hardcodes the signature algorithm
   which does not allow for crypto agility.  A COSE crypto algorithm can
   be specified with small overhead, and this changed is proposed for a
   future version of the draft.

8.  Privacy Considerations

   The mechanism in this draft does not reveal any additional
   information compared to X.509.

   Because of difference in size, it will be possible to detect that
   this profile is used.

   The gateway solution described in Section 4 requires unencrypted
   certificates.

9.  IANA Considerations

   This document registers a compression algorithm in the registry
   entitled "Certificate Compression Algorithm IDs", under the
   "Transport Layer Security (TLS) Extensions" heading (see
   [I-D.ietf-tls-certificate-compression]).




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   +------------------+--------------------------+
   | Algorithm Number | Description              |
   +------------------+--------------------------+
   | TBD              | cbor-iot                 |
   +------------------+--------------------------+

10.  References

10.1.  Normative References

   [I-D.ietf-cbor-7049bis]
              Bormann, C. and P. Hoffman, "Concise Binary Object
              Representation (CBOR)", draft-ietf-cbor-7049bis-05 (work
              in progress), January 2019.

   [I-D.ietf-tls-certificate-compression]
              Ghedini, A. and V. Vasiliev, "TLS Certificate
              Compression", draft-ietf-tls-certificate-compression-05
              (work in progress), April 2019.

   [RFC2119]  Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
              Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>.

   [RFC8174]  Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC
              2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174,
              May 2017, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8174>.

   [RFC8610]  Birkholz, H., Vigano, C., and C. Bormann, "Concise Data
              Definition Language (CDDL): A Notational Convention to
              Express Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) and
              JSON Data Structures", RFC 8610, DOI 10.17487/RFC8610,
              June 2019, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8610>.

10.2.  Informative References

   [I-D.selander-ace-cose-ecdhe]
              Selander, G., Mattsson, J., and F. Palombini, "Ephemeral
              Diffie-Hellman Over COSE (EDHOC)", draft-selander-ace-
              cose-ecdhe-13 (work in progress), March 2019.

   [PointCompression]
              Miller, V., "Use of Elliptic Curves in Cryptography.",
              Springer, Cham. Lecture Notes of the Institute for
              Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and
              Telecommunications Engineering, vol 218., 1986,
              <https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-39799-X_31>.



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   [RFC6347]  Rescorla, E. and N. Modadugu, "Datagram Transport Layer
              Security Version 1.2", RFC 6347, DOI 10.17487/RFC6347,
              January 2012, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6347>.

   [RFC7228]  Bormann, C., Ersue, M., and A. Keranen, "Terminology for
              Constrained-Node Networks", RFC 7228,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC7228, May 2014,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7228>.

   [RFC7925]  Tschofenig, H., Ed. and T. Fossati, "Transport Layer
              Security (TLS) / Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS)
              Profiles for the Internet of Things", RFC 7925,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC7925, July 2016,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7925>.

   [X.509-IoT]
              Forsby, F., Furuhed, M., Papadimitratos, P., and S. Raza,
              "Lightweight X.509 Digital Certificates for the Internet
              of Things.", Springer, Cham. Lecture Notes of the
              Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and
              Telecommunications Engineering, vol 242., July 2018,
              <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93797-7_14>.

Appendix A.  CBOR Certificate, CDDL

   certificate = [
     serial_number : uint,
     issuer : text,
     validity : [notBefore: int, notAfter: int],
     subject : text / bytes
     public_key : bytes
     ? extensions : [+ extension],
     signature : bytes
     ? signature_alg + public_key_info : bytes
   ]

   extension = [
     oid : int,
     ? critical : bool,
     value : bytes
   ]

Appendix B.  X.509 Certificate Profile, ASN.1

   IOTCertificate DEFINITIONS EXPLICIT TAGS ::= BEGIN

   Certificate  ::= SEQUENCE {
     tbsCertificate       TBSCertificate,



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     signatureAlgorithm   SignatureIdentifier,
     signature            BIT STRING
   }

   TBSCertificate  ::= SEQUENCE {
     version       \[0\] INTEGER {v3(2)},
     serialNumber       INTEGER (1..MAX),
     signature       SignatureIdentifier,
     issuer       Name,
     validity       Validity,
     subject       Name,
     subjectPublicKeyInfo       SubjectPublicKeyInfo,
     extensions       \[3\] Extensions OPTIONAL
   }

   SignatureIdentifier ::= SEQUENCE {
     algorithm       OBJECT IDENTIFIER (ecdsa-with-SHA256)
   Name  ::= SEQUENCE SIZE (1) OF DistinguishedName
   DistinguishedName  ::= SET SIZE (1) OF CommonName
   CommonName  ::= SEQUENCE {
     type       OBJECT IDENTIFIER (id-at-commonName),
     value       UTF8String
         -- For a CA, value is CA name, else EUI-64 in format
         -- "01-23-54-FF-FE-AB-CD-EF"
   }

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

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

   AlgorithmIdentifier ::= SEQUENCE {
     algorithm        OBJECT IDENTIFIER (id-ecPublicKey),
     parameters       OBJECT IDENTIFIER (prime256v1)
   }
     Extensions  ::= SEQUENCE SIZE (1..MAX) OF Extension

   Extension  ::= SEQUENCE {
     extnId          OBJECT IDENTIFIER,
     critical        BOOLEAN DEFAULT FALSE,
     extnValue       OCTET STRING
    }




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   ansi-X9-62          OBJECT IDENTIFIER   ::=
            {iso(1) member-body(2) us(840) 10045}

   id-ecPublicKey      OBJECT IDENTIFIER   ::=
            {ansi-X9-62 keyType(2) 1}

   prime256v1          OBJECT IDENTIFIER   ::=
            {ansi-X9-62 curves(3) prime(1) 7}

   ecdsa-with-SHA256   OBJECT IDENTIFIER   ::=
            {ansi-X9-62 signatures(4) ecdsa-with-SHA2(3) 2}

   id-at-commonName    OBJECT IDENTIFIER   ::=
            {joint-iso-itu-t(2) ds(5) attributeType(4) 3}

   END


Appendix C.  Certificate Example

   This section shows an example of an X.509 profiled certificate before
   CBOR encoding.

   Certificate:
       Data:
           Version: 3 (0x2)
           Serial Number: DEC (HEX)
       Signature Algorithm: ecdsa-with-SHA256
           Issuer: <23 byte issuer ID>
           Validity
               Not Before: <not_before_ts>
               Not After : <not_after_ts>
           Subject: <23 byte UID>
           Subject Public Key Info:
               Public Key Algorithm: id-ecPublicKey
                   Public-Key: (256 bit)
                   pub:
                       .. .. ..
                   ASN1 OID: prime256v1
                   NIST CURVE: P-256
           X509v3 extensions:
               X509v3 Basic Constraints: critical
                   CA:FALSE
               X509v3 Key Usage:
                   Digital Signature, Key Encipherment
       Signature Algorithm: ecdsa-with-SHA256
            .. .. ...




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Authors' Addresses

   Shahid Raza
   RISE AB

   Email: shahid.raza@ri.se


   Joel Hoeglund
   RISE AB

   Email: joel.hoglund@ri.se


   Goeran Selander
   Ericsson AB

   Email: goran.selander@ericsson.com


   John Mattsson
   Ericsson AB

   Email: john.mattsson@ericsson.com


   Martin Furuhed
   Nexus Group

   Email: martin.furuhed@nexusgroup.com





















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