The TLS Multiple Certificate Status Request Extension
draft-ietf-tls-multiple-cert-status-extension-01

Network Working Group                                       Y. Pettersen
Internet-Draft                                        Opera Software ASA
Intended status: Standards Track                            July 8, 2012
Expires: January 9, 2013

         The TLS Multiple Certificate Status Request Extension
            draft-ietf-tls-multiple-cert-status-extension-01

Abstract

   This document defines the Transport Layer Security (TLS) Certificate
   Status Version 2 Extension to allow clients to specify and support
   multiple certificate status methods.  Also defined is a new method
   that a server can use to provide status information (i.e., based on
   the Online Certificate Status Protocol and Server-Based Certificate
   Validation Protocol) not just about the server's own certificate, but
   also the status of intermediate certificates in the chain.

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 January 9, 2013.

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
   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

Pettersen                Expires January 9, 2013                [Page 1]
Internet-Draft    Multiple Certificate Status Extension        July 2012

   the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
   described in the Simplified BSD License.

   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

   The Transport Layer Security (TLS) Extension [RFC6066] framework
   defines, among other extensions, the Certificate Status Extension
   that clients can use to request the server's copy of the current
   status of its certificate.  The benefits of this extension include a
   reduced number of roundtrips and network delays for the client to
   verify the status of the server's certificate and a reduced load on
   the certificate issuer's status response servers, thus solving a
   problem that can become significant when the issued certificate is
   presented by a frequently visited server.

   There are two problems with the existing Certificate Status
   extension.  First, it does not provide functionality to request the
   status information about intermediate Certification Authority (CA)
   certificates, which means the client has to request status
   information through other methods, such as Certificate Revocation
   Lists (CRLs), thus adding additional delay.  Second, the current
   format of the extension and requirements in the TLS protocol prevents
   a client from offering the server multiple status methods; there are
   two methods available, the Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP)
   [RFC2560] and the Server-Based Certificate Validation Protocol (SCVP)
   [RFC5055].

   Many CAs now issue intermediate CA certificates that not only specify
   the publication point for their CRLs in CRL Distribution Point
   [RFC5280], but also specify a URL for their OCSP [RFC2560] server in
   Authority Information Access [RFC5280].  Given that client-cached
   CRLs are frequently out of date, clients would benefit from using
   OCSP, or other protocols, to access up-to-date status information
   about intermediate CA certificates.  The benefit to the issuing CA is
   less clear, as providing the bandwidth for the OCSP responder can be

Pettersen                Expires January 9, 2013                [Page 2]
Internet-Draft    Multiple Certificate Status Extension        July 2012

   costly, especially for CAs with many high-traffic subscriber sites,
   and this cost is a concern for many CAs.  There are cases where OCSP
   requests for a single high-traffic site caused significant network
   problems for the issuing CA.

   Clients will benefit from the TLS server providing certificate status
   information regardless of type, not just for the server certificate,
   but also for the intermediate CA certificates.  Combining the status
   checks into one extension will reduce the roundtrips needed to
   complete the handshake by the client to just those needed for
   negotiating the TLS connection.  Also, for the Certification
   Authorities, the load on their servers will depend on the number of
   certificates they have issued, not on the number of visitors to those
   sites.

   For such a new system to be introduced seamlessly, clients need to be
   able to indicate support for the existing OCSP Certificate Status
   method and a new multiple-OCSP mode or the new SCVP mode.

   Unfortunately, the definition of the Certificate Status extension
   only allows a single Certificate Status extension to be defined in a
   single extension record in the handshake, and the TLS Protocol
   [RFC5246] only allows a single record in the extension list for any
   given extension.  This means that it is not possible for clients to
   indicate support for new methods while still supporting older
   methods, which would cause problems for interoperability between
   newer clients and older servers.  This will not just be an issue for
   the multiple status request mode proposed above, but also for any
   other future status methods that might be introduced.  This will be
   true not just for the current PKIX infrastructure [RFC5280], but also
   for alternative PKI structures.

   The solution to this problem is to define a new extension,
   status_request_v2, with an extended format that allows the client to
   indicate support for multiple status request methods.  This is
   implemented using a list of CertificateStatusRequestItem records in
   the extension record.  As the server will select the single status
   method based on the selected cipher suite and the certificate
   presented, no significant changes are needed in the server's
   extension format.

1.1.  Requirements Language

   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].

Pettersen                Expires January 9, 2013                [Page 3]
Internet-Draft    Multiple Certificate Status Extension        July 2012

2.  Multiple Certificate Status Extension

2.1.  New extension

   The extension defined by this document is indicated by the
   "status_request_v2" in the ExtensionType enum, which uses the
   following value:

     enum {
       status_request_v2(XX), (65535)
     } ExtensionType;

   [[ EDITOR: The value used for status_request_v2 has been left as
   "XX".  This value will be assigned when this draft progresses to
   RFC.]]

2.2.  Multiple Certificate Status Request record

   Clients that support a certificate status protocol (i.e., OCSP and
   SCVP) may send the status_request_v2 extension to the server in order
   to use the TLS handshake to transfer such data instead of downloading
   it through separate connections.  When using this extension, the
   "extension_data" field of the extension SHALL contain a
   CertificateStatusRequestList where:

Pettersen                Expires January 9, 2013                [Page 4]
Internet-Draft    Multiple Certificate Status Extension        July 2012

   struct {
     CertificateStatusType status_type;
     uint16 request_length; /* Length of request field in bytes */
     select (status_type) {
       case ocsp: OCSPStatusRequest;
       case ocsp_multi: OCSPStatusRequest;
       case scvp: SCVPStatusRequest;
     } request;
   } CertificateStatusRequestItem;

   enum {
       ocsp(1), ocsp_multi(YY), scvp (AA),(255)
     } CertificateStatusType;

   struct {
     ResponderID responder_id_list<0..2^16-1>;
     Extensions request_extensions;
   } OCSPStatusRequest;

   struct {
     ResponderID responder_id_list<0..2^16-1>;
     Extensions request_extensions;
   } SCVPStatusRequest;

   opaque ResponderID<1..2^16-1>;
   opaque Extensions<0..2^16-1>;

   struct {
     CertificateStatusRequestItem certificate_status_req_list<1..2^16-1>
   } CertificateStatusRequestList

   [[ EDITOR: The values used for ocsp_multi and scvp have been left as
   "YY" and "AA", respectively.  These values will be assigned when this
   draft progresses to RFC.]]

   In the OCSPStatusRequest and SCVPStatusRequest structures, the
   "ResponderIDs" provide a list of OCSP and SCVP responders
   (respectively) that the client trusts.  A zero-length
   "responder_id_list" sequence has the special meaning that the
   responders are implicitly known to the server, e.g., by prior
   arrangement, or are identfied by the certificates used by the server.
   "Extensions" is a DER encoding [CCITT.X690.2002] of the OCSP and SCVP
   request extensions (respectively).

   Both "ResponderID" and "Extensions" are DER-encoded ASN.1 types as
   defined in [RFC2560] (for OCSP) and [RFC5055] (for SCVP).
   "Extensions" is imported from [RFC5280].  A zero-length

Pettersen                Expires January 9, 2013                [Page 5]
Internet-Draft    Multiple Certificate Status Extension        July 2012

   "request_extensions" value means that there are no extensions (as
   opposed to a zero-length ASN.1 SEQUENCE, which is not valid for the
   "Extensions" type).

   In the case of the "id-pkix-ocsp-nonce" OCSP extension, [RFC2560] is
   unclear about its encoding; for clarification, the nonce MUST be a
   DER-encoded OCTET STRING, which is encapsulated as another OCTET
   STRING (note that implementations based on an existing OCSP client
   will need to be checked for conformance to this requirement).

   The list of CertificateStatusRequestItem entries MUST be in order of
   preference.

   A server that receive a client hello containing the
   "status_request_v2" extension MAY return a suitable certificate
   status response message to the client along with the server's
   certificate message.  If OCSP is requested, it SHOULD use the
   information contained in the extension when selecting an OCSP
   responder and SHOULD include request_extensions in the OCSP request.

   The server returns a certificate status response along with its
   certificate by sending a "CertificateStatus" message immediately
   after the "Certificate" message (and before any "ServerKeyExchange"
   or "CertificateRequest" messages).  If a server returns a
   "CertificateStatus" message in response to a status_request_v2
   request, then the server MUST have included an extension of type
   "status_request_v2" with empty "extension_data" in the extended
   server hello.  The "CertificateStatus" message is conveyed using the
   handshake message type "certificate_status" as follows (see also
   [RFC6066]):

     struct {
       CertificateStatusType status_type;
       select (status_type) {
         case ocsp: OCSPResponse;
         case ocsp_multi: OCSPResponseList;
         case scvp: SCVPResponse;
       } response;
     } CertificateStatus;

     opaque OCSPResponse<0..2^24-1>;

     opaque SCVPResponse<0..2^24-1>;

     struct {
       OCSPResponse ocsp_response_list<1..2^24-1>
     } OCSPResponseList

Pettersen                Expires January 9, 2013                [Page 6]
Internet-Draft    Multiple Certificate Status Extension        July 2012

   An "OCSPResponse" element contains a complete, DER-encoded OCSP
   response (using the ASN.1 syntax [CCITT.X680.2002] of type
   OCSPResponse as defined in [RFC2560]).  Only one OCSP response, with
   a length of at least one byte, may be sent for status_type "ocsp".

   An "SCVPResponse" element contains a complete, DER-encoded SCVP
   response (using the ASN.1 syntax [CCITT.X680.2002] of type CVResponse
   as defined in [RFC5055]).  Only one SCVP response, with a length of
   at least one byte, may be sent for status_type "scvp".  An SCVP
   response can include the status of intermediate certificates.

   An "ocsp_response_list" contains a list of "OCSPResponse" elements,
   as specified above, each containing the OCSP response for the
   matching corresponding certificate in the server's Certificate TLS
   handshake message.  That is, the first entry is the OCSP response for
   the first certificate in the Certificate list, the second entry is
   the response for the second certificate, and so on.  The list MAY
   contain fewer OCSP responses than there were certificates in the
   Certificate handshake message, but there MUST NOT be more responses
   than there were certificates in the list.  Individual elements of the
   list MAY have a length of 0 (zero) bytes, if the server does not have
   the OCSP response for that particular certificate stored, in which
   case, the client MUST act as if a response was not received for that
   particular certificate.  If the client receives a
   "ocsp_response_list" that does not contain a response for one or more
   of the certificates in the completed certificate chain, the client
   SHOULD attempt to validate the certificate using an alternative
   retrieval method, such as downloading the relevant CRL; OCSP SHOULD
   in this situation only be used for the end entity certificate, not
   intermediate CA certificates, for reasons stated above.

   Note that a server MAY also choose not to send a "CertificateStatus"
   message, even if it has received a "status_request_v2" extension in
   the client hello message and has sent a "status_request_v2" extension
   in the server hello message.  Additionally, note that that a server
   MUST NOT send the "CertificateStatus" message unless it received
   either a "status_request" or "status_request_v2" extension in the
   client hello message and sent a corresponding "status_request" or
   "status_request_v2" extension in the server hello message.

   Clients requesting a certificate response and receiving either one or
   more OCSP responses or a SCVP response in a "CertificateStatus"
   message MUST check the response(s) and abort the handshake, if the
   response is a revoked status or is otherwise not satisfactory with a
   bad_certificate_status_response(113) alert.  This alert is always
   fatal.

   [[Open issue: At least one reviewer has suggested that the client

Pettersen                Expires January 9, 2013                [Page 7]
Internet-Draft    Multiple Certificate Status Extension        July 2012

   should treat an unsatisfactory (non-revoked) response as an empty
   response for that particular response and fall back to the
   alternative method described above]]

3.  IANA Considerations

   Section 2.1 defines the new TLS Extension status_request_v2 enum,
   which should be added to the ExtensionType Values list in the IANA
   TLS category after IETF Concensus has decided to add the value.

   Section 2.2 describes a TLS CertificateStatusType Registry to be
   maintained by the IANA.  CertificateStatusType values are to be
   assigned via IETF Review as defined in [RFC5226].  The initial
   registry corresponds to the definition of "ExtensionType" in
   Section 2.2.

4.  Security Considerations

   General Security Considerations for TLS Extensions are covered in
   [RFC5246].  Security Considerations for the particular extension
   specified in this document are given below.  In general, implementers
   should continue to monitor the state of the art and address any
   weaknesses identified.

4.1.  Security Considerations for status_request_v2

   If a client requests an OCSP or SCVP response, it must take into
   account that an attacker's server using a compromised key could (and
   probably would) pretend not to support the extension.  In this case,
   a client that requires OCSP or SCVP validation of certificates SHOULD
   either contact the OCSP or SCVP server directly or abort the
   handshake.

   Use of the OCSP (id-pkix-ocsp-nonce) or SCVP nonce request extension
   may improve security against attacks that attempt to replay OCSP or
   SCVP responses; see Section 4.4.1 of [RFC2560] and Section 9 of
   [RFC5055] for further details.

   The security considerations of [RFC2560] apply to OCSP requests and
   responses, and the security considerations of [RFC5055] apply to SCVP
   erquests and responses.

5.  Acknowledgements

   This document is based on [RFC6066] authored by Donald Eastlake 3rd.

Pettersen                Expires January 9, 2013                [Page 8]
Internet-Draft    Multiple Certificate Status Extension        July 2012

   The SCVP status type description is based on text provided by Sean
   Turner.

6.  Normative References

   [CCITT.X680.2002]
              International International Telephone and Telegraph
              Consultative Committee, "Abstract Syntax Notation One
              (ASN.1): Specification of basic notation",
              CCITT Recommendation X.680, July 2002.

   [CCITT.X690.2002]
              International International Telephone and Telegraph
              Consultative Committee, "ASN.1 encoding rules:
              Specification of basic encoding Rules (BER), Canonical
              encoding rules (CER) and Distinguished encoding rules
              (DER)", CCITT Recommendation X.690, July 2002.

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

   [RFC2560]  Myers, M., Ankney, R., Malpani, A., Galperin, S., and C.
              Adams, "X.509 Internet Public Key Infrastructure Online
              Certificate Status Protocol - OCSP", RFC 2560, June 1999.

   [RFC5055]  Freeman, T., Housley, R., Malpani, A., Cooper, D., and W.
              Polk, "Server-Based Certificate Validation Protocol
              (SCVP)", RFC 5055, December 2007.

   [RFC5226]  Narten, T. and H. Alvestrand, "Guidelines for Writing an
              IANA Considerations Section in RFCs", BCP 26, RFC 5226,
              May 2008.

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

   [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.

   [RFC6066]  Eastlake, D., "Transport Layer Security (TLS) Extensions:
              Extension Definitions", RFC 6066, January 2011.

Pettersen                Expires January 9, 2013                [Page 9]
Internet-Draft    Multiple Certificate Status Extension        July 2012

Author's Address

   Yngve N. Pettersen
   Opera Software ASA

   Email: yngve@opera.com

Pettersen                Expires January 9, 2013               [Page 10]