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Internet X.509 Public Key Infrastructure -- HTTP Transport for CMP
draft-ietf-pkix-cmp-transport-protocols-19

The information below is for an old version of the document.
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This is an older version of an Internet-Draft that was ultimately published as RFC 6712.
Authors Tomi Kause , Martin Peylo
Last updated 2012-05-24 (Latest revision 2012-05-15)
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Send notices to pkix-chairs@tools.ietf.org, draft-ietf-pkix-cmp-transport-protocols@tools.ietf.org
draft-ietf-pkix-cmp-transport-protocols-19
Network Working Group                                           T. Kause
Internet-Draft                                                    Tectia
Updates: 4210 (if approved)                                     M. Peylo
Intended status: Standards Track                                     NSN
Expires: November 16, 2012                                  May 15, 2012

   Internet X.509 Public Key Infrastructure -- HTTP Transport for CMP
             draft-ietf-pkix-cmp-transport-protocols-19.txt

Abstract

   This document describes how to layer the Certificate Management
   Protocol over HTTP.  It is the "CMPtrans" document referenced in RFC
   4210 and therefore updates the reference given therein.

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 November 16, 2012.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2012 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
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   (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
   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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   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.

Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
   2.  Conventions Used in This Document  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
   3.  HTTP-Based Protocol  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
     3.1.  HTTP Versions  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
     3.2.  Persistent Connections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
     3.3.  General Form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
     3.4.  Media Type . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  6
     3.5.  Communication Workflow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  6
     3.6.  HTTP Request-URI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  6
     3.7.  Pushing of Announcements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  6
     3.8.  HTTP Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  7
   4.  Implementation Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  9
   5.  Security Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
   6.  IANA Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
   7.  Acknowledgments  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
   8.  References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
     8.1.  Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
     8.2.  Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
   Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

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1.  Introduction

   The Certificate Management Protocol (CMP) [RFC4210] requires a well
   defined transport mechanism to enable End Entities (EEs),
   Registration Authorities (RAs) and Certification Authorities (CAs) to
   pass PKIMessage sequences between them.

   The first version of the CMP specification [RFC2510] included a brief
   description of a simple transport protocol layer on top of TCP.  Its
   features was simple transport level error-handling and a mechanism to
   poll for outstanding PKI messages.  Additionally it was mentioned
   that PKI messages could also be conveyed using file-, E-mail- and
   HTTP-based transport, but those were not specified in detail.

   The current version of the CMP specification [RFC4210] incorporated
   its own polling mechanism and thus the need for a transport protocol
   providing this functionality vanished.  The remaining features CMP
   requires from its transport protocols are connection and error
   handling.

   Before this document was published as an RFC, the draft version
   underwent drastic changes during the long-lasting work process.  The
   "TCP-Based Management Protocol" was enhanced and a TCP-Messages-over-
   HTTP transport specification appeared.  As both proved to be needless
   and cumbersome, implementers preferred to use plain HTTP transport
   following [RFC1945] or [RFC2616].  This document now reflects that by
   exclusively describing HTTP as transport protocol for CMP.

   The usage of HTTP for transporting CMP messages exclusively uses POST
   method for requests, effectively tunneling CMP over HTTP.  While this
   is generally considered as bad practice and should not be emulated,
   there are good reasons to do so for transporting CMP.  HTTP is used
   as it is generally easy to implement and able to traverse network
   borders utilizing ubiquitous proxies.  Most importantly, HTTP is
   already commonly used in existing CMP implementations.  Other HTTP
   request methods such as GET are not used as PKI management operations
   can only be triggered using CMP's PKI messages which need to be
   transported within a POST request.

   With its status codes HTTP provides needed error reporting
   capabilities.  General problems on the server side as well as those
   directly caused by the respective request can be reported to the
   client.

   As CMP implements a transaction ID, identifying transactions spanning
   over more than just a single request/response pair, the statelessness
   of HTTP is not blocking its usage as transport protocol for CMP
   messages.

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2.  Conventions Used in This Document

   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].

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3.  HTTP-Based Protocol

   For direct interaction between two entities, where a reliable
   transport protocol like TCP is available, HTTP SHOULD be utilized for
   conveying CMP messages.

3.1.  HTTP Versions

   Implementations MUST support HTTP/1.0 [RFC1945], and SHOULD support
   HTTP/1.1 [RFC2616].

3.2.  Persistent Connections

   HTTP persistent connections [RFC2616] allow multiple interactions to
   take place on the same HTTP connection.  However, neither HTTP nor
   the protocol specified in this document are designed to correlate
   messages on the same connection in any meaningful way; persistent
   connections are only a performance optimization.  In particular,
   intermediaries can do things like mix connections from different
   clients into one "upstream" connections, terminate persistent
   connections and forward requests as non-persistent requests, etc.  As
   such, implementations MUST NOT infer that requests on the same
   connection come from the same client (e.g., for correlating PKI
   messages with ongoing transactions); every message is to be evaluated
   in isolation.

3.3.  General Form

   A DER-encoded PKIMessage is sent as the entity-body of an HTTP POST
   request.  If this HTTP request is successful, the server returns the
   CMP response in the body of the HTTP response.  The HTTP response
   status code in this case MUST be 200; other "Successful 2xx" codes
   MUST NOT be used for this purpose.  HTTP responses to pushed CMP
   Announcement messages (i.e., CA Certificate Announcement, Certificate
   Announcement, Revocation Announcement, and CRL Announcement) utilize
   the status codes 201 and 202 to identify whether the received
   information was processed.

   While "Redirection 3xx" status codes MAY be supported by
   implementations, clients should only be enabled to automatically
   follow them after careful consideration of possible security
   implications.

   All applicable "Client Error 4xx" or "Server Error 5xx" status codes
   may be used to inform the client about errors.

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3.4.  Media Type

   The Internet Media Type "application/pkixcmp" MUST be set in the HTTP
   header when conveying a PKIMessage.

3.5.  Communication Workflow

   In CMP most communication is initiated by the end entities where
   every CMP request triggers a CMP response message from the CA or RA.

   The CMP Announcement messages described in Section 3.7 are an
   exception.  Their creation may be triggered by certain events or done
   on a regular basis by a CA.  The recipient of the Announcement only
   replies with an HTTP status code acknowledging the receipt or
   indicating an error but not with a CMP response.

   If the receipt of an HTTP request is not confirmed by receiving an
   HTTP response, it MUST be assumed that the transported CMP message
   was not successfully delivered to its destination.

3.6.  HTTP Request-URI

   The Request-URI is formed as specified in [RFC3986].

   A server implementation MUST handle Request-URI paths with or without
   a trailing slash as identical.

   An example of a Request-Line and a Host header field in an HTTP/1.1
   header, sending a CMP request to a server, located in the "/cmp" path
   of the host "example.com", would be

      POST /cmp HTTP/1.1
      Host: example.com

   or in the absoluteURI form

      POST http://example.com/cmp/ HTTP/1.1
      Host: example.com

3.7.  Pushing of Announcements

   A CMP server may create event-triggered announcements or generate
   them on a regular basis.  It MAY utilize HTTP transport to convey
   them to a suitable recipient.  As no request messages are specified
   for those announcements they can only be pushed to the recipient.

   If an EE wants to poll for a potential CA Key Update Announcement or
   the current CRL, a PKI Information Request using a General Message as

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   described in E.5 of [RFC4210] can be used.

   When pushing Announcement messages, PKIMessage structures are sent as
   the entity-body of an HTTP POST request.

   Suitable recipients for CMP announcements might e.g. be repositories
   storing the announced information such as directory services.  Those
   listen for incoming messages, utilizing the same HTTP Request-URI
   scheme as defined in Section 3.6.

   The following PKIMessages are announcements that may be pushed by a
   CA.  The prefixed numbers reflect ASN.1 numbering of the respective
   element.

      [15] CA Key Update Announcement
      [16] Certificate Announcement
      [17] Revocation Announcement
      [18] CRL Announcement

   CMP Announcement messages do not require any CMP response.  However,
   the recipient MUST acknowledge receipt with a HTTP response having an
   appropriate status code and an empty body.  When not receiving such
   response it MUST be assumed that the delivery was not successful and
   if applicable the sending side may retry sending the Announcement
   after waiting for an appropriate time span.

   If the announced issue was successfully stored in a database or was
   already present, the answer MUST be an HTTP response with a "201
   Created" status code and empty message body.

   In case the announced information was only accepted for further
   processing, the status code of the returned HTTP response MAY also be
   "202 Accepted".  After an appropriate delay, the sender may then try
   to send the Announcement again and may repeat this until it receives
   a confirmation that it had been successfully processed.  The
   appropriate duration of the delay and the option to increase it
   between consecutive attempts should be carefully considered.

   A receiver MUST answer with a suitable 4xx or 5xx HTTP error code
   when a problem occurs.

3.8.  HTTP Considerations

   While implementations MAY make use of all defined features of the
   HTTP protocol, they SHOULD keep the protocol utilization as simple as
   possible.  E.g. there is no benefit in using chunked Transfer-
   Encoding as the length of an ASN.1 sequence is know when starting to
   send it.

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   There is no need for the clients to send an "Expect" request-header
   field with the "100-continue" expectation and wait for a "100
   Continue" status as described in chapter 8.2.3 of [RFC2616].  The CMP
   payload sent by a client is relatively small, so having extra
   messages exchanged is more inefficient as the server will anyway only
   seldom reject a message without evaluating the body.

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4.  Implementation Considerations

   Implementors should be aware that implementations might exist that
   use a different approach for HTTP transport because this document has
   been under development for more than a decade.  Further,
   implementations based on earlier drafts of this document might use an
   unregistered "application/pkixcmp-poll" MIME type.

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5.  Security Considerations

   The following aspects need to be considered by implementers and
   users:

   1.  There is the risk for denial of service attacks through resource
       consumption by opening many connections to an HTTP server.
       Therefore idle connections should be terminated after an
       appropriate timeout, maybe also depending on the available free
       resources.  After sending a CMP Error Message, the server should
       close the connection even if the CMP transaction is not yet fully
       completed.

   2.  Without being encapsulated in effective security protocols such
       as TLS [RFC5246] there is no integrity protection at the HTTP
       protocol level.  Therefore information from the HTTP protocol
       should not be used to change state of the transaction.

   3.  Client users should be aware that storing the target location of
       a HTTP response with the "301 Moved Permanently" status code
       could be exploited by a man-in-the-middle attacker to block them
       permanently from contacting the correct server.

   4.  If no measures to authenticate and protect the HTTP responses to
       pushed Announcement messages are in place their information
       regarding the Announcement's processing state may not be trusted.
       In that case the overall design of the PKI system must not depend
       on the Announcements being reliably received and processed by
       their destination.

   5.  CMP provides inbuilt integrity protection and authentication.
       The information communicated unencrypted in CMP messages does not
       contain sensitive information endangering the security of the PKI
       when intercepted.  However, it might be possible for an
       eavesdropper to utilize the available information to gather
       confidential technical or business critical information.
       Therefore users of the HTTP transport for CMP might want to
       consider using HTTP over TLS according to [RFC2818] or virtual
       private networks created e.g. by utilizing Internet Protocol
       Security according to [RFC4301].

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6.  IANA Considerations

   The IANA has already registered the MIME media type "application/
   pkixcmp" for identifying CMP sequences due to an request made in
   connection with [RFC2510].

   No further action by the IANA is necessary for this document or any
   anticipated updates.

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7.  Acknowledgments

   Until the fifth draft version of this document, released on November
   24th 2000, the sole authors were Amit Kapoor and Ronald Tschlaer from
   Certicom.  Up to this point the now removed TCP-Based transport was
   described in detail.  They are not available for this working on this
   document anymore at the time it is entering the "Authors Final Review
   state AUTH48".  As they therefore cannot approve this document as it
   would be necessary, their names were moved to this section.  Their
   contact data as originally stated by them is as follows:

      Amit Kapoor
      Certicom
      25801 Industrial Blvd
      Hayward, CA
      US
      Email: amit@trustpoint.com

      Ronald Tschalaer
      Certicom
      25801 Industrial Blvd
      Hayward, CA
      US
      Email: ronald@trustpoint.com

   The authors gratefully acknowledge the contributions of various
   members of the IETF PKIX Working Group and the ICSA CA-talk mailing
   list (a list solely devoted to discussing CMP interoperability
   efforts).

   By providing ideas, giving hints and doing invaluable review work,
   the following alphabetically listed individuals have significantly
   contributed to this document:

      Tomas Gustavsson, Primekey
      Peter Gutmann, University of Auckland
      Wolf-Dietrich Moeller, Nokia Siemens Networks

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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.

   [RFC2510]  Adams, C. and S. Farrell, "Internet X.509 Public Key
              Infrastructure Certificate Management Protocols",
              RFC 2510, March 1999.

   [RFC2616]  Fielding, R., Gettys, J., Mogul, J., Frystyk, H.,
              Masinter, L., Leach, P., and T. Berners-Lee, "Hypertext
              Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1", RFC 2616, June 1999.

   [RFC3986]  Berners-Lee, T., Fielding, R., and L. Masinter, "Uniform
              Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax", STD 66,
              RFC 3986, January 2005.

   [RFC4210]  Adams, C., Farrell, S., Kause, T., and T. Mononen,
              "Internet X.509 Public Key Infrastructure Certificate
              Management Protocol (CMP)", RFC 4210, September 2005.

8.2.  Informative References

   [RFC1945]  Berners-Lee, T., Fielding, R., and H. Nielsen, "Hypertext
              Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.0", RFC 1945, May 1996.

   [RFC2818]  Rescorla, E., "HTTP Over TLS", RFC 2818, May 2000.

   [RFC4301]  Kent, S. and K. Seo, "Security Architecture for the
              Internet Protocol", RFC 4301, December 2005.

   [RFC5246]  Dierks, T. and E. Rescorla, "The Transport Layer Security
              (TLS) Protocol Version 1.2", RFC 5246, August 2008.

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Authors' Addresses

   Tomi Kause
   Tectia Corporation
   Kumpulantie 3
   Helsinki  00520
   Finland

   Email: toka@tectia.com

   Martin Peylo
   Nokia Siemens Networks
   Linnoitustie 6
   Espoo  02600
   Finland

   Email: martin.peylo@nsn.com

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