The application/pkcs10 Media Type
RFC 5967

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Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)                         S. Turner
Request for Comments: 5967                                          IECA
Updates: 2986                                                August 2010
Category: Informational
ISSN: 2070-1721

                   The application/pkcs10 Media Type

Abstract

   This document specifies a media type used to carry PKCS #10
   certification requests as defined in RFC 2986.  It carries over the
   original specification from RFC 2311, which recently has been moved
   to Historic status, and properly links it to RFC 2986.

Status of This Memo

   This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is
   published for informational purposes.

   This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force
   (IETF).  It represents the consensus of the IETF community.  It has
   received public review and has been approved for publication by the
   Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG).  Not all documents
   approved by the IESG are a candidate for any level of Internet
   Standard; see Section 2 of RFC 5741.

   Information about the current status of this document, any errata,
   and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at
   http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5967.

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
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   publication of this document.  Please review these documents
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   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.

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RFC 5967              application/pkcs10 Media Type          August 2010

   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.

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 into the PKCS #10
   document [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
   definition of the application/pkcs10 media type and an IANA
   registration based on [RFC4288].

   The text for Section 2 is adapted 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 that allows a user to generate cryptographic
   information has to submit that information to a Certification
   Authority (CA), who transforms it into a certificate.  PKCS #10
   [RFC2986] describes a syntax for certification requests.

   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.

2.1.  Format of the application/pkcs10 Body

   PKCS #10 defines the ASN.1 type CertificationRequest for use in
   submitting a certification request.  For transfer to a CA, this
   abstract syntax needs to be encoded and identified in a unique

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RFC 5967              application/pkcs10 Media Type          August 2010

   manner.  When the media type application/pkcs10 is used, the body
   MUST be a CertificationRequest.

   A robust application SHOULD output Distinguished Encoding Rules
   (DER), but allow Basic Encoding Rules (BER) or DER on input.

   Data produced by BER or DER is 8-bit, but some transports are limited
   to 7-bit data.  In such cases, a suitable 7-bit transfer encoding
   MUST be applied; in MIME-compatible transports, the base64 encoding