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CBOR Object Signing and Encryption (COSE): Headers for carrying and referencing X.509 certificates
draft-schaad-cose-x509-02

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This is an older version of an Internet-Draft whose latest revision state is "Replaced".
Author Jim Schaad
Last updated 2018-07-02
Replaced by draft-ietf-cose-x509, draft-ietf-cose-x509, RFC 9360
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draft-schaad-cose-x509-02
Network Working Group                                          J. Schaad
Internet-Draft                                            August Cellars
Intended status: Informational                              July 2, 2018
Expires: January 3, 2019

  CBOR Object Signing and Encryption (COSE): Headers for carrying and
                     referencing X.509 certificates
                       draft-schaad-cose-x509-02

Abstract

   This document defines a set of headers to identify and transport
   X.509 certificates in the CBOR Encoded Message (COSE) syntax.  The
   document additionally defines a set of digest algorithms that are
   used in identifying certificates, as well as being available for
   other uses.

Contributing to this document

   The source for this draft is being maintained in GitHub.  Suggested
   changes should be submitted as pull requests at <https://github.com/
   cose-wg/X509>.  Instructions are on that page as well.  Editorial
   changes can be managed in GitHub, but any substantial issues need to
   be discussed on the COSE mailing list.

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 https://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 3, 2019.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2018 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.

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   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
   Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
   (https://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.

Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
     1.1.  Requirements Terminology  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   2.  X.509 COSE Headers  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   3.  Hash Algorithm Identifiers  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
     3.1.  SHA-2 256-bit Hash  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
     3.2.  SHA-2 256-bit Hash trucated to 64 bits  . . . . . . . . .   6
   4.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
     4.1.  COSE Header Parameter Registry  . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
     4.2.  COSE Algorithm Registry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
   5.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
   6.  References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
     6.1.  Normative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
     6.2.  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
   Author's Address  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10

1.  Introduction

   In the process of writing [RFC8152] discussions where held on the
   question of X.509 certificates [RFC5280] and if there were needed.
   At the time there were no use cases presented that appeared to have a
   sufficient set of support to include these headers.  Since that time
   a number of cases where X.509 certificate support is necessary have
   been defined.  This document provides a set of headers that will
   allow applications to transport and refer to X.509 certificates in a
   consistent manner.

   Some of the constrainted device situations are being used where an
   X.509 PKI is already installed.  One of these situations is the 6tish
   environment for enrollment of devices where the certificates are
   installed at the factory.  The [I-D.selander-ace-cose-ecdhe] draft
   was also written with the idea that long term certificates could be
   used to provide for authentication of devices and uses them to
   establish session keys.  A final scenario is the use of COSE as a
   messaging application where long term existence of keys can be used
   along with a central authentication authority.  The use of

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   certificates in this scenario allows for key managment to be used
   which is well understood.

   Additionally, there has been an increasing need to have a set of
   standardized set of identifies for digest algorithms.  Many cases one
   needs to sign a manifest which contains a pointer to a data
   structure, a digest algorithm and the digest value.  This structure
   means that one is not required to include a document in order to have
   it correctly identified.  As digest algoithms are also used in
   identification of certificates, an initial set of digest algorithms
   is defined in this document.

1.1.  Requirements Terminology

   The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and
   "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP
   14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all
   capitals, as shown here.

2.  X.509 COSE Headers

   The use of X.509 certificates allows for an existing trust
   infrastructure to be used with COSE.  This includes the full suite of
   enrollment protocols, trust anchors, trust chaining and revocation
   checking that have been defined over time by the IETF and other
   organizations.  The key structures that have been defined in COSE
   currently do not support all of these properties although some may be
   found in COSE Web Tokens (CWT) [I-D.ietf-ace-cbor-web-token].

   It is not necessarily expected that constrainted devices will fully
   support the evalaluation and processing of X.509 certificates, it is
   perfectly reasonable for a certificate to be assigned to a device
   which it can then provide to a relying party along with a signature
   or encrypted message, the relying party not being a constrained
   device.

   Certificates obtained from any of these methods MUST still be
   validated.  This validation can be done via the PKIX rules in
   [RFC5280] or by using a different trust structure, such as a trusted
   certificate distributer for self-signed certificates.  The PKIX
   validation includes matching against the trust anchors configured for
   the application.  These rules apply to certificates of a chain length
   of one as well as longer chains.  If the application cannot establish
   a trust in the certificate, then it cannot be used.

   The header parameters defined in this document are:

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   x5bag:  This header parameters contains a bag of X.509 certificates.
      The set of certificates in this header are unordered and may
      contain self-signed certificates.  The certificate bag can contain
      certificates which are completely extraneous to the message.  An
      example of this would be to carry a certificate with a key
      agreement key usage in a signed message.  As the certificates are
      unordered, the party evaluating the signature will need to do the
      necessary path building.  Certificates needed for any particular
      chain to be built may be absent from the bag.

      As this header element does not provide any trust, the header
      parameter can be in either a protected or unprotected header bag.

      This header parameter allows for a single or a bag of X.509
      certificates to be carried in the message.

      *  If a single certificate is conveyed, it is placed in a CBOR
         bstr.

      *  If multiple certificates are conveyed, a CBOR array of bstrs is
         used.  Each certificate being in it's own slot.

   x5chain:  This header parameter contains an ordered array of X.509
      certificates.  The certificates are to be ordered starting with
      the certificate containing the end-entity key followed by the
      certificate which signed it and so on.  The chain of certificates
      can be truncated if there is reason to believe that the relying
      party will already have it.

      As this header element does not provide any trust, the header
      parameter can be in either a protected or unprotected header bag.

      This header parameter allows for a single or a bag of X.509
      certificates to be carried in the message.

      *  If a single certificate is conveyed, it is placed in a CBOR
         bstr.

      *  If multiple certificates are conveyed, a CBOR array of bstr is
         used.  Each certificate being in it's own slot.

   x5t:  This header parameter provides the ability to identify an X.509
      certificate by a hash value.  The parameter is an array of two
      elements.  The first element is an algorithm identifier which is a
      signed integer or a string containing the hash algorithm
      identifier.  The second element is a binary string containing the
      hash value.

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      As this header element does not provide any trust, the header
      parameter can be in either a protected or unprotected header bag.
      For interoperability, applications which use this header parameter
      MUST support the hash algorithm 'sha256', but can use other hash
      algorithms.

   x5u:  This header parameter provides the ability to identify an X.509
      certificate by a URL.  The referenced resource can be any of the
      following media types:

      *  application/pkix-cert [RFC2585]

      *  application/pkcs7-mime; smime-type="certs-only"
         [I-D.ietf-lamps-rfc5751-bis]

      *  application/x-pem-file [RFC7468]

      As this header element implies a trust relationship, the header
      parameter MUST be in the protected header bag.
      The URL provided MUST provide integrity protection.  For example,
      an HTTP or CoAP GET request to retrieve a certificate MUST use TLS
      [RFC5246] or DTLS.  If the certificate does not chain to an
      existing trust anchor, the identity of the server MUST be
      configured as trusted to provide new trust anchors.  This will
      normally be the situation when self-signed certificates are used.

   The header paramters used in the following locations:

   o  COSE_Signature and COSE_Sign0 objects, in these objects they
      identify the key that was used for generating signature.

   o  COSE_recipient object, in this object they identify the key used
      by the sender for static-static key agreement algorithms.

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   +---------+-------+---------------+---------------------------------+
   | name    | label | value type    | description                     |
   +---------+-------+---------------+---------------------------------+
   | x5bag   | TBD4  | COSE_X509     | An unordered bag of X.509       |
   |         |       |               | certificates                    |
   |         |       |               |                                 |
   | x5chain | TBD3  | COSE_X509     | An ordered chain of X.509       |
   |         |       |               | certificates                    |
   |         |       |               |                                 |
   | x5t     | TBD1  | COSE_CertHash | Hash of an X.509 certificate    |
   |         |       |               |                                 |
   | x5u     | TBD2  | tstr          | URL pointing to an X.509        |
   |         |       |               | certificate                     |
   +---------+-------+---------------+---------------------------------+

                        Table 1: X.509 COSE Headers

   Below is an equivalent CDDL [I-D.ietf-cbor-cddl] description of the
   text above

   COSE_X509 = bstr / [ *certs: bstr ]
   COSE_CertHash = [ hashAlg: (int / tstr), hashValue: bstr ]

3.  Hash Algorithm Identifiers

   The core COSE document did have a need for a standalone hash
   algorithm, and thus did not define any.  In this document, two hash
   algorithms are defined for use with the 'x5t' header parameter.
   Nothing restricts their use in other contexts.

3.1.  SHA-2 256-bit Hash

   The SHA-2 256-bit algorithm is defined in [SHA2].  Define an
   algorithm identifier for SHA-256.

3.2.  SHA-2 256-bit Hash trucated to 64 bits

   This hash function uses the SHA-2 256-bit hash function as in the
   previous section, however it truncates the result to 64-bits for
   transmission.  The fact that it is a trucated hash means that there
   is now a high likelyhood that colisions will occur, thus this hash
   function cannot be used in situations where a unique items is
   required to be identified.  Luckly for the case of identifying a
   certificate that is not a requirement, the only requirement is that
   the number of potential certificates (and thus keys) to be tried is
   reduced to a small number.  (Hopefully that number is one, but it can
   not be assumed to be.)  After the set of certificates has been
   filtered down, the public key in each certificate will need to be

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   tried for the operation in question.  The certificate can be
   validated either before or after it has been checked as working.  The
   trade-offs involved are:

   o  Certificate validation before using the key will imply that more
      network traffic may be required in order to fetch certificates and
      do revocation checking.

   o  Certificate validation after using the key means that bad keys can
      be used and, if not carefully checked, the result may be used
      prior to completing the certificate validation.  Using unvalidated
      keys can expose the device to more timing and oracle attacks as
      the attacker would be able to see if the key operation succeeded
      or failed as no network traffic to validate the certificate would
      ensue.

4.  IANA Considerations

4.1.  COSE Header Parameter Registry

   It is requested that IANA create four new entries in the "COSE Header
   Parameters" registry.  The content of these entries is:

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   Name: x5bag
   Label: TBD4
   Value Type: bstr | [+bstr]
   Value Registry: N/A
   Description: X.509 certificate bag
   Reference: [[This Document]]

   Name: x5chain
   Label: TBD3
   Value Type: bstr | [+bstr]
   Value Registry: N/A
   Description: X.509 certificate chain
   Reference: [[This Document]

   Name: x5t
   Label: TBD1
   Value Type: COSE_CertHash
   Value Registry: N/A
   Description: X.509 certificate thumbprint
   Reference: [[This Document]]

   Name: x5u
   Label: TBD2
   Value Type: tstr
   Value Registry: N/A
   Description: URL pointing to an X.509 certificate
   Reference: [[This Description]]

4.2.  COSE Algorithm Registry

   It is requested that IANA create two new entries in the "COSE
   Algorithms" registry.  The content of these entries is:

   Name: SHA256
   Value: TBD5
   Description:  SHA-256 Digest
   Reference: [[This Document]]
   Recommended: Yes

   Name: SHA256/64
   Value: TBD6
   Description: SHA-256 Digest truncated to 64-bits
   Reference: [[This Document]]
   Recommended: No

   Note to designated expert: It may be reasonable to use a single byte
   entry for the truncated algorthm, but I think it should be in the two

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   byte range.  There is no reason not to place the full SHA-256
   algorithm in the three byte range, but I expect it to be in the 2
   byte range.

5.  Security Considerations

   There are security considerations:

6.  References

6.1.  Normative References

   [RFC2119]  Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
              Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>.

   [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, DOI 10.17487/RFC5280, May 2008,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5280>.

   [RFC8152]  Schaad, J., "CBOR Object Signing and Encryption (COSE)",
              RFC 8152, DOI 10.17487/RFC8152, July 2017,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8152>.

   [RFC8174]  Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC
              2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174,
              May 2017, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8174>.

   [SHA2]     National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST),
              "Secure Hash Standard", FIPS 180-4, August 2015.

6.2.  Informative References

   [I-D.ietf-ace-cbor-web-token]
              Jones, M., Wahlstroem, E., Erdtman, S., and H. Tschofenig,
              "CBOR Web Token (CWT)", draft-ietf-ace-cbor-web-token-15
              (work in progress), March 2018.

   [I-D.ietf-cbor-cddl]
              Birkholz, H., Vigano, C., and C. Bormann, "Concise data
              definition language (CDDL): a notational convention to
              express CBOR data structures", draft-ietf-cbor-cddl-02
              (work in progress), February 2018.

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   [I-D.ietf-lamps-rfc5751-bis]
              Schaad, J., Ramsdell, B., and S. Turner, "Secure/
              Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME) Version 4.0
              Message Specification", draft-ietf-lamps-rfc5751-bis-10
              (work in progress), June 2018.

   [I-D.selander-ace-cose-ecdhe]
              Selander, G., Mattsson, J., and F. Palombini, "Ephemeral
              Diffie-Hellman Over COSE (EDHOC)", draft-selander-ace-
              cose-ecdhe-08 (work in progress), March 2018.

   [RFC2585]  Housley, R. and P. Hoffman, "Internet X.509 Public Key
              Infrastructure Operational Protocols: FTP and HTTP",
              RFC 2585, DOI 10.17487/RFC2585, May 1999,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2585>.

   [RFC5246]  Dierks, T. and E. Rescorla, "The Transport Layer Security
              (TLS) Protocol Version 1.2", RFC 5246,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC5246, August 2008,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5246>.

   [RFC7468]  Josefsson, S. and S. Leonard, "Textual Encodings of PKIX,
              PKCS, and CMS Structures", RFC 7468, DOI 10.17487/RFC7468,
              April 2015, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7468>.

   [TRUNCATE]
              National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST),
              "Recommendation fro Applications Using Approved Hash
              Algorithms", FIPS 800-107, August 2012.

Author's Address

   Jim Schaad
   August Cellars

   Email: ietf@augustcellars.com

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