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Using Secure DNS to Associate Certificates with Domain Names For S/MIME
draft-ietf-dane-smime-04

The information below is for an old version of the document.
Document Type
This is an older version of an Internet-Draft that was ultimately published as RFC 8162.
Authors Paul E. Hoffman , Jakob Schlyter
Last updated 2014-01-08
Replaces draft-hoffman-dane-smime
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draft-ietf-dane-smime-04
Network Working Group                                         P. Hoffman
Internet-Draft                                            VPN Consortium
Updates: 6698 (if approved)                                  J. Schlyter
Intended status: Standards Track                                Kirei AB
Expires: July 11, 2014                                   January 7, 2014

Using Secure DNS to Associate Certificates with Domain Names For S/MIME
                        draft-ietf-dane-smime-04

Abstract

   This document describes how to use secure DNS to associate an S/MIME
   user's certificate with the intended domain name, similar to the way
   that DANE (RFC 6698) does for TLS.

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 http://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 11, 2014.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2014 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.

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Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
     1.1.  Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   2.  The SMIMEA Resource Record  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   3.  Domain Names for S/MIME Certificate Associations  . . . . . .   3
   4.  Mandatory-to-Implement Features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
   5.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
     5.1.  SMIMEA RRtype . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   6.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   7.  Acknowledgements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   8.  References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     8.1.  Normative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     8.2.  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
   Authors' Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6

1.  Introduction

   S/MIME [RFC5751] messages often contain a certificate.  This
   certificate assists in authenticating the sender of the message and
   can be used for encrypting messages that will be sent in reply.  In
   order for the S/MIME receiver to authenticate that a message is from
   the sender who is identified in the message, the receiver's mail user
   agent (MUA) must validate that this certificate is associated with
   the purported sender.  Currently, the MUA must trust a trust anchor
   upon which the sender's certificate is rooted, and must successfully
   validate the certificate.

   Some people want to authenticate the association of the sender's
   certificate with the sender without trusting a configured trust
   anchor.  Given that the DNS administrator for a domain name is
   authorized to give identifying information about the zone, it makes
   sense to allow that administrator to also make an authoritative
   binding between email messages purporting to come from the domain
   name and a certificate that might be used by someone authorized to
   send mail from those servers.  The easiest way to do this is to use
   the DNS.

   This document describes a mechanism for associating a user's
   certificate with the domain that is similar to that described in DANE
   itself [RFC6698].  Most of the operational and security
   considerations for using the mechanism in this document are described
   in RFC 6698, and are not described here at all.  Only the major
   differences between this mechanism and those used in RFC 6698 are
   described here.  Thus, the reader must be familiar with RFC 6698
   before reading this document.

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1.1.  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 RFC 2119 [RFC2119].

   This document also makes use of standard PKIX, DNSSEC, and S/MIME
   terminology.  See PKIX [RFC5280], DNSSEC [RFC4033], [RFC4034],
   [RFC4035], and SMIME [RFC5751] for these terms.

2.  The SMIMEA Resource Record

   The SMIMEA DNS resource record (RR) is used to associate an end
   entity certificate or public key with the associated email address,
   thus forming a "SMIMEA certificate association".  The semantics of
   how the SMIMEA RR is interpreted are given later in this document.

   The type value for the SMIMEA RRtype is defined in Section 5.1.  The
   SMIMEA resource record is class independent.  The SMIMEA resource
   record has no special TTL requirements.  The SMIMEA wire format and
   presentation format are the same as for the TLSA record.

3.  Domain Names for S/MIME Certificate Associations

   Domain names are prepared for requests in the following manner.

   1.  The user name (the "left-hand side" of the email address, called
       the "local-part" in the mail message format definition [RFC2822]
       and the "local part" in the specification for internationalized
       email [RFC6530]), is encoded with Base32 [RFC4648], to become the
       left-most label in the prepared domain name.  This does not
       include the "@" character that separates the left and right sides
       of the email address.

   2.  The string "_smimecert" becomes the second left-most label in the
       prepared domain name.

   3.  The domain name (the "right-hand side" of the email address,
       called the "domain" in RFC 2822) is appended to the result of
       step 2 to complete the prepared domain name.

   For example, to request a SMIMEA resource record for a user whose
   address is "chris@example.com", you would use
   "MNUHE2LT._smimecert.example.com" in the request.  The corresponding
   resource record in the example.com zone might look like:

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   MNUHE2LT._smimecert.example.com. IN SMIMEA (
      0 0 1 d2abde240d7cd3ee6b4b28c54df034b9
            7983a1d16e8a410e4561cb106618e971 )

   Design note: Encoding the user name with Base32 allows local parts
   that have characters that would prevent their use in domain names in
   typical applications.  Even though the DNS protocol itself can use
   any octet value in a label, most applications that use DNS names are
   limited to a much smaller set of allowed characters.  For example, a
   period (".") is a valid character in a local part, but would wreak
   havoc in a domain name unless the application using the name somehow
   quoted it.  Similarly, RFC 6530 allows non-ASCII characters in local
   parts, and encoding a local part with non-ASCII characters with
   Base32 renders the name usable in applications that use the DNS.

   Note that Base32 strings can end in one or more "=" characters.  For
   example, if the user name is "sal", the Base32 encoding is
   "ONQWY===", so the request would be for
   "ONQWY===._smimecert.example.com".

   Also note that user names can be any length, and labels are limited
   to 63 octets.  Also note that user names that are encoded with Base32
   are longer than the original user name.  Any user name that would
   cause a label of longer than 63 octets is expressly prohibited by
   this specification.

   Wildcards can be more useful for SMIMEA than they are for TLSA.  If a
   site publishes a trust anchor certificate for all users on the site
   (certificate usage 0 or 2), it could make sense to use a wildcard
   resource record such as "*._smimecert.example.com".

4.  Mandatory-to-Implement Features

   S/MIME MUAs conforming to this specification MUST be able to
   correctly interpret SMIMEA records with certificate usages 0, 1, 2,
   and 3.  S/MIME MUAs conforming to this specification MUST be able to
   compare a certificate association with a certificate offered by
   another S/MIME MUA using selector types 0 and 1, and matching type 0
   (no hash used) and matching type 1 (SHA-256), and SHOULD be able to
   make such comparisons with matching type 2 (SHA-512).

5.  IANA Considerations

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5.1.  SMIMEA RRtype

   This document uses a new DNS RRtype, SMIMEA, whose value will be
   allocated by IANA from the Resource Record (RR) TYPEs subregistry of
   the Domain Name System (DNS) Parameters registry.

   TODO: there needs to be new registries for certificate usages,
   selectors, and maching types, pre-populated with the values from
   TLSA.

6.  Security Considerations

   DNS zones that are signed with DNSSEC using NSEC for denial of
   existence are susceptible to zone-walking, a mechanism that allow
   someone to enumerate all the names in the zone.  Someone who wanted
   to collect email addresses from a zone that uses SMIMEA might use
   such a mechanism.  DNSSEC-signed zones using NSEC3 for denial of
   existence are significantly less susceptible to zone-walking.
   Someone could still attempt a dictionary attack on the zone to find
   SMIMEA records, just as they can use dictionary attacks on an SMTP
   server to see which addresses are valid.

   Client treatment of any information included in the trust anchor is a
   matter of local policy.  This specification does not mandate that
   such information be inspected or validated by the domain name
   administrator.

7.  Acknowledgements

   Miek Gieben and Martin Pels contributed technical ideas and support
   to this document.

8.  References

8.1.  Normative References

   [RFC2119]  Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
              Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.

   [RFC4033]  Arends, R., Austein, R., Larson, M., Massey, D., and S.
              Rose, "DNS Security Introduction and Requirements", RFC
              4033, March 2005.

   [RFC4034]  Arends, R., Austein, R., Larson, M., Massey, D., and S.
              Rose, "Resource Records for the DNS Security Extensions",
              RFC 4034, March 2005.

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   [RFC4035]  Arends, R., Austein, R., Larson, M., Massey, D., and S.
              Rose, "Protocol Modifications for the DNS Security
              Extensions", RFC 4035, March 2005.

   [RFC4648]  Josefsson, S., "The Base16, Base32, and Base64 Data
              Encodings", RFC 4648, October 2006.

   [RFC5280]  Cooper, D., Santesson, S., Farrell, S., Boeyen, S.,
              Housley, R., and W. Polk, "Internet X.509 Public Key
              Infrastructure Certificate and Certificate Revocation List
              (CRL) Profile", RFC 5280, May 2008.

   [RFC5751]  Ramsdell, B. and S. Turner, "Secure/Multipurpose Internet
              Mail Extensions (S/MIME) Version 3.2 Message
              Specification", RFC 5751, January 2010.

   [RFC6698]  Hoffman, P. and J. Schlyter, "The DNS-Based Authentication
              of Named Entities (DANE) Transport Layer Security (TLS)
              Protocol: TLSA", RFC 6698, August 2012.

8.2.  Informative References

   [RFC2822]  Resnick, P., "Internet Message Format", RFC 2822, April
              2001.

   [RFC6530]  Klensin, J. and Y. Ko, "Overview and Framework for
              Internationalized Email", RFC 6530, February 2012.

Authors' Addresses

   Paul Hoffman
   VPN Consortium

   Email: paul.hoffman@vpnc.org

   Jakob Schlyter
   Kirei AB

   Email: jakob@kirei.se

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