Network Working Group S. Turner Internet Draft IECA Intended Status: Informational Track February 3, 2010 Updates: 2986 (once approved) Expires: August 3, 2010 The application/pkcs10 Media Type draft-turner-application-pkcs10-media-type-00.txt Abstract This document specifies a media type used to carry PKCS#10 certification requests as defined in RFC 2986. Status of this Memo This Internet-Draft is submitted to IETF in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79. This document may contain material from IETF Documents or IETF Contributions published or made publicly available before November 10, 2008. The person(s) controlling the copyright in some of this material may not have granted the IETF Trust the right to allow modifications of such material outside the IETF Standards Process. Without obtaining an adequate license from the person(s) controlling the copyright in such materials, this document may not be modified outside the IETF Standards Process, and derivative works of it may not be created outside the IETF Standards Process, except to format it for publication as an RFC or to translate it into languages other than English. 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 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." The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt. The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html. This Internet-Draft will expire on August 3, 2010. Turner Expires August 3, 2010 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft application/pkcs10 Media Type February 2010 Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2010 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 (http://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. 1. Introduction [RFC2311] first defined the application/pkcs10 media type. When [RFC2633] was published, the application/pkcs10 section was dropped, but for some reason the text was not incorporated in to PKCS#10 [RFC2986]. [RFC2311] was moved to historic status by [RFC5751]. To ensure the IANA media type registration points to a non-historic document, this document updates [RFC2986] with the application/pkcs10 mime media type registration. The text for Section 2 is taken directly from Section 3.7 of [RFC2311]. 1.1. Requirements 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 [RFC2119]. 2. Creating a Certification Request A typical application which allows a user to generate cryptographic information has to submit that information to a certification authority, who transforms it into a certificate. PKCS #10 describes a syntax for certification requests. The application/pkcs10 body type MUST be used to transfer a PKCS #10 certification request. The details of certification requests and the process of obtaining a certificate are beyond the scope of this memo. Instead, only the format of data used in application/pkcs10 is defined. Turner Expires August 3, 2010 [Page 2]
Internet-Draft application/pkcs10 Media Type February 2010 2.1. Format of the application/pkcs10 Body PKCS #10 defines the ASN.1 type CertificationRequest for use in submitting a certification request. Therefore, when the MIME content type application/pkcs10 is used, the body MUST be a CertificationRequest, encoded using the Basic Encoding Rules (BER) [X.690]. Although BER is specified, instead of the more restrictive DER [X.690], a typical application will use DER since the CertificationRequest's CertificationRequestInfo has to be DER-encoded in order to be signed. A robust application SHOULD output DER, but allow BER or DER on input. Data produced by BER or DER is 8-bit, but many transports are limited to 7-bit data. Therefore, a suitable 7-bit Content-Transfer-Encoding SHOULD be applied. The base64 Content-Transfer-Encoding [RFC4648] SHOULD be used with application/pkcs10, although any 7-bit transfer encoding may work. 2.2. Sending and Receiving an application/pkcs10 Body Part For sending a certificate-signing request, the application/pkcs10 message format MUST be used to convey a PKCS #10 certificate-signing request. Note that for sending certificates and CRLs messages without any signed content, the application/pkcs7-mime message format MUST be used to convey a degenerate PKCS #7 signedData "certs-only" message [RFC5751]. To send an application/pkcs10 body, the application generates the cryptographic information for the user. The details of the cryptographic information are beyond the scope of this memo. Step 1. The cryptographic information is placed within a PKCS #10 CertificationRequest. Step 2. The CertificationRequest is encoded according to BER or DER (typically, DER). Step 3. As a typical step, the DER-encoded CertificationRequest is also base64 encoded so that it is 7-bit data suitable for transfer in SMTP. This then becomes the body of an application/pkcs10 body part. The result might look like this: Turner Expires August 3, 2010 [Page 3]
Internet-Draft application/pkcs10 Media Type February 2010 Content-Type: application/pkcs10; name=smime.p10 Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=smime.p10 rfvbnj756tbBghyHhHUujhJhjH77n8HHGT9HG4VQpfyF467GhIGfHfYT6 7n8HHGghyHhHUujhJh4VQpfyF467GhIGfHfYGTrfvbnjT6jH7756tbB9H f8HHGTrfvhJhjH776tbB9HG4VQbnj7567GhIGfHfYT6ghyHhHUujpfyF4 0GhIGfHfQbnj756YT64V A typical application only needs to send a certification request. It is a certification authority that has to receive and process the request. The steps for recovering the CertificationRequest from the message are straightforward but are not presented here. The procedures for processing the certification request are beyond the scope of this document. 3. IANA Considerations The media type for a PKCS#10 certification request is application/pkc10. Type name: application Subtype name: pkcs10 Required parameters: None Optional parameters: None Encoding considerations: See Section 2. Security considerations: Clients use a certification request to request that a Certification Authority certify a public key. The certification request is digitally signed. Interoperability considerations: See Section 2. Published specification: RFC 2986 Applications which use this media type: The content type is used with MIME-complaint transport to transfer PKCS#10 certification requests [PKCS#10]. Additional information: Turner Expires August 3, 2010 [Page 4]
Internet-Draft application/pkcs10 Media Type February 2010 Magic number(s): None File extension(s): .p10 Macintosh File Type Code(s): none Person & email address to contact for further information: Sean Turner turners@ieca.com Restrictions on usage: none Author: Sean Turner <turners@ieca.com> Intended usage: COMMON Change controller: The IESG <iesg@ietf.org> 4. Security Considerations The security considerations of [RFC2986] and [RFC5751] apply; however, no new security considerations are introduced by this document. 5. References 5.1. Normative References [RFC2986] Nystrom, M, and B. Kaliski, " PKCS #10: Certification Request Syntax Specification Version 1.7", RFC 2986, November 2000. [RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997. [RFC4648] Josefsson, S., "The Base16, Base32, and Base64 Data Encodings", RFC 4648, October 2006. [X.690] ITU-T Recommendation X.690 (2002) | ISO/IEC 8825- 1:2002. Information Technology - ASN.1 encoding rules: Specification of Basic Encoding Rules (BER), Canonical Encoding Rules (CER) and Distinguished Encoding Rules (DER). Turner Expires August 3, 2010 [Page 5]
Internet-Draft application/pkcs10 Media Type February 2010 5.2. Informative References [RFC2311] Dusse, S., Hoffman, P., Ramsdell, B., Lundblade, L., and L. Repka, "S/MIME Version 2 Message Specification", RFC 2311, March 1998. [RFC2633] Ramsdell, B., "S/MIME Version 3 Message Specification", RFC 2633, June 1999. [RFC5751] Turner, S. and B. Ramsdell, "Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME) Version 3.2 Message Specification", RFC 5751, January 2010. Acknowledgements I wish to thank the authors of RFC 2311, Steve Dusse, Paul Hoffman, Blake Ramsdell, Laurence Lundblade, and Lisa Repka. Authors' Addresses Sean Turner IECA, Inc. 3057 Nutley Street, Suite 106 Fairfax, VA 22031 USA EMail: turners@ieca.com Turner Expires August 3, 2010 [Page 6]
