SecDispatch Y. Nir
Internet-Draft Dell EMC
Intended status: Informational T. Fossati
Expires: September 6, 2018 Nokia
Y. Sheffer
Intuit
T. Eckert
Huawei
March 5, 2018
Considerations For Using Short Term Certificates
draft-nir-saag-star-01
Abstract
Recently there has been renewed interest in an old idea: Issue
certificates with short validity periods and forego revocation
processing, reasoning that expiration is a sufficient replacement for
revocation as long as that expiration is not too far off.
This document covers considerations, both security and operational,
for using such Short Term Auto Renewed (STAR) certificates for
various scenarios where Using a revocation protocol is considered
inappropriate.
Status of This Memo
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This Internet-Draft will expire on September 6, 2018.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2018 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.1. Conventions Used in This Document . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Short Term Auto Renewed Certificates . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.1. Alternative Design: OCSP Stapling . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.2. The Case For Foregoing Revocation . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3. Use Cases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
3.1. Data Center Network Hosts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
3.2. Distributed System Installed in One Or More Data Centers 6
3.2.1. Distributed Network Security Functions . . . . . . . 6
3.3. Certificate Delegation for Content Delivery Networks . . 6
3.4. Autonomic Networking Infrastructure . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4. Operational Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
4.1. Certificate Lifetime and Renewal Schedule . . . . . . . . 7
4.2. Availability of the Certificate Authority . . . . . . . . 8
4.3. Clock Skew and the notBefore Field . . . . . . . . . . . 9
4.4. Automatic Renewal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
4.5. Secure (Re-)Enrollments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
4.6. Future enhancements for renewal/re-enrollment . . . . . . 11
4.7. Certificate Transparency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
5. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
5.1. Reasons for Revocation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
5.2. Longevity and Revocation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
5.3. Clock Skew and Security . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
5.4. CA availability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
6. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
7. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
7.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
7.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
1. Introduction
Certificates ([RFC5280]) are used in multiple protocols such as the
Internet Key Exchange (IKEv2-[RFC7296]) and the Transport Layer
Security protocol (TLS-[RFC5246]). Certificates are used to
authenticate communicating parties to each other. Certificates are
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issued by Certificate Authorities (CAs) to End Entities (EE) to be
used to authenticate them to Relying Parties (RPs) in security
protocols. Systems that use secure communications typically include
certificate authorities, end entities and relying parties, with some
nodes in the network having more than one of these roles.
When deploying a system involving secure communications, one of the
challenges is how to deal with compromise of an End Entity's private
key. The standard way of dealing with this is adding a protocol
layer for revocation such as CRLs ([RFC5280]) or OCSP ([RFC6960]).
Such revocation protocols have drawbacks. Although caching of CRLs
and OCSP responses is allowed, each setup of a secure channel may
require accessing the CRL distribution point (DP) or the OCSP
responder. This is both time consuming and provides the system with
a few more modes of failure. Assuring reliability of the revocation
service increases the cost, and overcoming the latency issue requires
changes to the security protocols. All other things being equal, a
system that includes revocation checking is more complex and less
reliable than a system that does not include it.
For these reasons it is attractive to forego revocation checking.
Some deployed systems do this by either eliminating the CRL DP and
OCSP extensions from the certificates, or ignoring network and
timeout errors in fetching revocation information. Both practices
reduce the security of the system.
An alternative solution to the revocation problem is to issue
certificates with a short validity period and forego revocation
checking. Normally certificates are issued with a validity period of
between a few months and a few years. With a shorter validity period
if the private key is compromised the potential for abuse is lower
because the certificate and its private key expire within a short
period of time - a few hours to a few days.
The rest of this document describes operational and security
considerations with using short term certificates.
1.1. 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].
Throughout this document we will use the term DP to denote a server
for revocation information, either a CRL distribution point or an
OCSP Responder. For our purposes they are the same.
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We use the term longevity for the period of time between certificate
issuance and the time of its expiration as indicated in the notAfter
field of the certificate. Note that issuance time may be different
from the notBefore field in the certificate.
The text describes end entities as renewing their certificates
because the usual operational model for certificates is one of
"pull": end entities create certificate requests and send them to CAs
for signature. Some systems are designed around a "push" operation
where either the CA or a management function generates a new
certificate and installs it on the end entity. The text in the
document uses pull terminology, but is equally relevant for a push
design.
2. Short Term Auto Renewed Certificates
Short term certificates are like any other [RFC5280] certificates
except that the period of time between their issuance and their
notAfter date is relatively short. Whereas normally certificates are
issued for a period of time between a few months and a few years,
short term certificates usually expire after a few hours, a few days,
or at a limit a couple of weeks.
The certificates discussed in this document have neither a CRL DP
extension nor an OCSP authorityInformationAccess extension. In other
words such certificates cannot be revoked. Instead, they are valid
until they expire.
Automatic certificate renewal is getting ever more popular with
enrollment protocols such as EST ([RFC7030]) or ACME
([I-D.ietf-acme-acme]). For short term certificates automatic
renewal is essential as a human cannot be expected to flawlessly
perform a manual renewal every few days or hours. This document does
not recommend any particular automatic renewal method, but
Section 4.4 recommends that some such method be used. Automatic
renewal processing can roll over the keys from one certificate to its
successor, or it can generate new keys with each Certificate
generation. As revocation may not exist, multiple certificates for
the same EE may be valid at any given time.
The solution for revocation in this scheme is to stop the automatic
renewal. The existing compromised certificate will remain valid
until it expires. See the considerations in Section 5.1 about
revocation.
[Topalovic] describes the design of a system involving STAR
certificates for the web, and analyzes its security and efficacy. It
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concludes that STAR certificates can be as secure as certificates
with OCSP revocation.
2.1. Alternative Design: OCSP Stapling
Relying parties can also avoid the need for contacting the DP at
connection setup by having the End Entities implement OCSP stapling.
This feature has the EEs rather than the RPs retrieve the OCSP
response and send it as part of the protocol. OCSP stapling is
described for TLS in [RFC6961] and [RFC6066], and for IKE in
[RFC4806].
STAR has several advantages over OCSP stapling:
o A CA that only signs certificates is simpler than a CA that both
signs certificates and issues OCSP responses. In fact, a CA for
STAR does not need to keep any record of issued certificates.
o A system that does not use CRLs or OCSP need not have an always-
available DP for delivering those CRLs or OCSP responses. This
reduces both complexity and attack surface.
o OCSP stapling in TLS versions prior to 1.3 works only for the
server as end entity. There was no provision for sending the OCSP
response for a client certificate in the protocol.
2.2. The Case For Foregoing Revocation
When explaining PKI to people, it is hard to justify why the CA or a
delegate needs to both sign blob-1 (the certificate) and also sign
blob-2 (the CRL or OCSP response) to tell relying parties that blob-1
is still valid. Surely one signed blob should be enough.
The explanation that we come up with is that traditionally issuing a
certificate required human intervention, while the revocation
checking object could be issued automatically and at great frequency.
So blob-1 would have to be valid for long enough to not over-burden
the human charged with maintaining them, while blob-2 could be re-
issued frequently.
This explanation no longer holds up. While the initial certificate
enrollment may need to be initiated by a human, protocols exist today
that make certificate renewal just as automated as CRL issuance.
Certificates can be just as frequently issued as CRLs were in the
past. The added complexity is no longer needed.
In real systems such as the web relying parties or end entities cache
revocation objects as long as it's allowed. If a CRL has a
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nextUpdate field that is 4 days in the future, a typical system will
not attempt to fetch a new one before those 4 days have elapsed. For
this reason, moving to STAR certificates provides a similar level of
security to what is generally practiced on the web.
3. Use Cases
This section lists some use cases where STAR certificates seem to be
more appropriate than long-lived certificates with revocation
checking. The purpose of this section is only motivational. None of
the following sections are intended to be a definition of the use
case or the standard by which future documents or implementations
will be measured for sufficiency.
3.1. Data Center Network Hosts
TBA
3.2. Distributed System Installed in One Or More Data Centers
This is a system installed in multiple hosts in one or more data
centers that fulfills some task and requires mutual authentication of
its components. An example of such a system is a Storage Area
Network (SAN).
3.2.1. Distributed Network Security Functions
This example of a distributed system is multiple network security
functions (NSF) [RFC8192] where the SDN controller needs to
authenticate the NSFs with which it communicates, and some NSFs need
to communicate with each other.
3.3. Certificate Delegation for Content Delivery Networks
TBA
3.4. Autonomic Networking Infrastructure
The Autonomic Network Infrastructure (see
[I-D.ietf-anima-reference-model]) is an IETF ANIMA Working Group
developed network system architecture to provide the foundation for
both future "autonomic networks" (AN), as well as the infrastructure
to enable zero-touch secure bootstrapping of domain-wide PKI
certificates for network equipment (BRSKI, see
[I-D.ietf-anima-bootstrapping-keyinfra]) as well as the set-up of a
zero-touch, secure communications fabric for management of existing
networks (ACP, see [I-D.ietf-anima-autonomic-control-plane],
especially in the context of evolving SDN control & management (see
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[I-D.ietf-anima-stable-connectivity]) . These domain certificates
are furthermore meant to be reuseable across all network services
between network equipment in that domain, therefore allowing to
eliminate the need for per-service crypto management (IGP, multicast,
BGP, netconf/COPS/radius connections,...).
Overall, the PKI related functions of ANI intend to increase
proliferation of PKI security through simplification, achieved
through automation and making solutions more resilient by minimizing
managed component requirements. CRL or OCSP introduce another set of
servers/services that needs to be managed/automated/distributed. The
connectivity requirement to such servers and/or the grace periods
during which connectivity to them is not required introduce more
complex system/security design parameters.
With ANI/ACP/BRSKI, renewal of certificates is fully automated and
therefore shorter lifetimes of certificates can easily be used to
avoid the additional need for CRL/OCSP. The limitation on reducing
certificate lifetimes is only the desired maximum length of time
during which connectivity to a CA for renewal may not exist - and the
maximum renewal rate of certificates that can be supported by those
CA.
Because of the ACP, connectivity to the CA is also more resilient
against network/provisioning/configuration problems than network
without an ACP. Lastly, the whole ANI is built and maintained
autonomously without the need of any configurations except for one or
more seed-nodes that perform an expanded version of a PKI
Registration Authority.
4. Operational Considerations
The motivations for using short-term certificates are operational.
We don't want the latency introduced by fetching the CRL from the DP;
we don't want the cost of making the DP 99.999% reliable, and we
don't want the cost of making the network paths from all RPs to the
DP always available.
Deploying short term certificates comes with its own set of
operational considerations, and some of these are enumerated in the
following sub-sections.
4.1. Certificate Lifetime and Renewal Schedule
Since we do not assume the CA to be close to 100% available it makes
sense for End Entities to renew their certificates well in advance.
While the security considerations in Section 5.2 set an upper limit
on the longevity of a STAR certificate, operational necessity sets
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the frequency of renewal. It is necessary to strike a balance
between renewing too often which leads to increased load on the CA
and renewing too seldom which increases the risk of having the
certificate expire while either the CA or the End Entity are down.
Individual system properties play a significant role here. Systems
where both the CA and the EEs are expected to be up all of the time
absent a fault may choose to renew a day or even an hour before
expiration, while systems with nodes that are only up infrequently
and for short periods of time may choose to renew the certificates
whenever the EEs happen to be up.
As a general rule of thumb for systems where the CA is mostly
available it makes sense for the EE to make the first attempt to
renew its certificate about half-way through its lifetime. If that
attempt fails because the CA is not available an EE SHOULD retry at
regular intervals until it succeeds. Shortly before expiration, the
EE SHOULD increase the frequency of retires.
For example, suppose a STAR certificate is issued for 8 days. The EE
will first attempt to renew the certificate 4 days before expiration.
If that fails it will retry every three hours until only six hours
are left before expiration. At that point it will increase the
frequency and retry every five minutes. If this is part of the
system design, at this point it should also alert the user that
something is wrong.
4.2. Availability of the Certificate Authority
While the STAR design does not require 99.999% availability, the CA
does need to be available for renewing certificates. Downtimes of
more than a quarter of the certificate longevity SHOULD NOT happen.
For most modern hardware this is entirely possible even without
exotic clustering solutions, but when configuring the system
administrators should consider that the longevity of the certificates
constrains the required availability of the CA.
When setting the longevity for certificates administrators SHOULD
consider how long it takes to recover from a failure of the CA. That
length of time can be seconds with a good clustering solution, but
can span hours or days without one, especially if the fault happens
at a bad time. A failure of a CA should be considered a conceivable
occurrence, and longevity should be set so that such a failure does
not lead to expiration and outage.
Conversely, if short longevity is required by security targets, the
CA should be made more reliable with clustering solutions.
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4.3. Clock Skew and the notBefore Field
Despite NTP ([RFC5905]) being over thirty years old and implemented
in every major operating system clock skew is a fact of life and many
deployed systems don't have the right time. It is also not possible
to just mandate the use of NTP because the systems that use STAR
certificates are often installed on hosts and networks where NTP is
either not configured or blocked. We cannot assume that these
systems can enable NTP at will.
Skewed clocks have always been a problem for certificates. Because
STAR certificates are always just a few days or hours from expiration
they are more sensitive to clock skew. A sufficiently skewed clock
can cause three different disfunctions and for STAR certificate such
disfunction happens with considerably less skew than with long term
certificates:
o A valid certificate may be rejected as not yet valid if the
current system time is earlier than its notBefore time.
Fortunately this issue can be safely mitigated by setting the
notBefore field to a time earlier than the time of issuance.
o A valid certificate may be rejected as expired if the current
system time is later than its notAfter time. As long as the clock
skew is not too great this is solved by a sensible renewal policy.
If as in the example in Section 4.1 the certificate is renewed 4
days before expiration or within a few hours after that, a clock
skew of up to 3 days will not be a problem.
o An expired certificate may be accepted if the current system time
is earlier than its notAfter time. This is a security issue that
is discussed in Section 5.3.
There are several common modes of clock skew:
o The system that doesn't have its clock set at all. These systems
might be set to January 1st, 1970 or to some date that was
interesting for the hardware vendor. Such systems are
incompatible with certificates and MUST NOT be used for STAR
certificates.
o The system has its timezone set wrong, and the system time was set
so that local time looks good. This limits the clock skew to 24
hours and is generally workable.
o A system that has the time set right but the date set wrong.
These are also not usable with certificates.
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o A system that was set to the correct time once but has since
drifted away. Computer hardware varies wildly between systems
with quartz clocks that drift only a few seconds a month and
systems that can lose or gain minutes a day. The former are quite
usable, the latter are not.
Because of the prevalence of systems with a relatively small skew it
is RECOMMENDED to set the notBefore field to a time 72 hours before
the actual issuance date.
End Entities MUST NOT use expired certificates and Relying Parties
SHOULD alert whenever an expired certificate is presented. This will
help the users keep their host clocks set or encourage them to enable
NTP.
4.4. Automatic Renewal
Automatic enrollment and renewal is recommended for any system using
certificates. While it is possible to renew certificates manually on
time, even organizations with the best of IT departments occasionally
miss this: [cert-expires]
With short term certificates, this becomes even more important.
Renewing a certificate manually every few days or hours is extremely
labor intensive, especially when the system contains hundreds,
thousands or more end entities, and the risk of outages becomes a
certainty.
This document does not mandate any particular enrollment or renewal
mechanism. Any of a myriad of standard and proprietary methods can
be used and systems with proprietary methods have been shipping for
years. The IETF is in the process of standardizing the ACME protocol
for enrollment and renewal ([I-D.ietf-acme-acme]) and an extension is
proposed to make it more suitable for STAR certificates
([I-D.ietf-acme-star]). The ANI as described in Section 3.4 is a
complete zero touch system design providing and relying on automatic
certificate renewal.
4.5. Secure (Re-)Enrollments
When short lived certificates expire, automatic re-enrollment can
further help to provide survivable, resilient PKI security.
Traditionally, initial enrollments, even with otherwise automated
solutions such as EST ([RFC7030]) required a manual interaction, or
else the device had to perform TOFU (Trust On First Use) to be
automatically enrolled. TOFU is even more problematic for re-
enrollments and becomes more problematic, the shorter lived
certificates and/or trust anchors are. Consider the risk where
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during re-enrollment, the device may already be fully configured and
could be taken over by an attacker just having to wait for a short
lived certificate device certificate or trust anchor to expire. Or
consider devices auto-resetting themselves to factory conditions to
avoid this problem and then not having to be re-enrolled, but also be
re-configured - in the absence of fully zero-touch provisioning
solutions.
ANIs BRSKI protocol ([I-D.ietf-anima-bootstrapping-keyinfra], which
introduces extensions to EST), and NetConf Zero Touch
([I-D.ietf-netconf-zerotouch] allow fully automated enrollment and
re-enrollment of device certificate and trust anchors through the use
of "vouchers" ([I-D.ietf-anima-voucher]). These are new digital
artifacts that allow enrolling devices to securely trust domains to
(re-)enroll them. They work by providing a signed statement by a
representative of the manufacturer of the device, that the device
with a specified identity (e.g: IDevID) should trust a particular
domain - identified by an initial trust anchor. This allows to
overcome the biggest challenge of expired short lived certificates/
trust-anchors.
Furthermore, if the certificate and/or trust anchors are required for
security of network connectivity - such as routing protocol security
or network layer encryption - to even reach a re-enrollment server,
then there is yet another challenge with short lived certificates/
trust-anchors and their higher likelyhood of expiring.
In the case of ANI, network layer security (e.g.: IPsec) is used for
protecting network connectivity including to reach the EST renewal
server. When certificate/TA are expired, renewal can not be used.
Instead though, automatic re-enrollment can be used, which does not
rely on generic network layer security, but instead relies on its own
proxy service to provide connectivity for such devices that need to
re-enroll. Nevertheless, re-enrollment may be a complex operation
due to the potential need to involve the above mentioned
representative entity of the manufacturer to generate vouchers.
4.6. Future enhancements for renewal/re-enrollment
One easy improvement that is specifically of interest with the use of
short-lived device certificates/trust-anchors is a new interpretation
of the lifetime of certificates. Today, there is no clear
distinction when or how to apply the lifetime, and in result, it is
usually assumed to be applicable to all operations relying on those
certificates.
In the case of short-lived certificates, the elements performing
certificate renewal/re-enrollment can easily have a different
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interpretation of the lifetime and may not rely on what the
certificate itself says. This allows to turn re-enrollments into
renewals and avoid possible complexities or manual steps potentially
required for re-enrollment (depending on the system used).
In the case of BRSKI/EST, there is only one TLS connection used for
renewal and/or re-enrollment and expiry affects the certificates used
on this TLS connection. The server uses EST for renewal or the
extended signaling of BRSKI for re-enrollment. When a device with
expired, short-lived certificate connects to the BRSKI/EST server,
this server could allow to perform only simple EST renewal instead of
re-enrollment with a voucher by simply considering the lifetime of
the presented (and expired) device certificate to be extended.
This type of re-interpretation requires primarily some generic work
to allow this type of interpretation - and then per-solution work to
leverage this interpretation. In the case of BRSKI/EST for example,
devices would simply use their expired domain certificate to
authenticate themselves and perform certificate renewal - instead of
using their IDevID and trying to re-enroll (which is a more complex
operation with potentially external dependenices against the
manufacturer component).
4.7. Certificate Transparency
Certificate Transparency (CT), [RFC6962] is about keeping a log of
all issued certificates.
A system that issues a certificate every few days to thousands or end
entities will create more records for a CT log than a web host that
gets one certificate every year.
TBA: Discussion about this.
5. Security Considerations
STAR certificates eliminate an important security feature of PKI
which is the ability to revoke certificates. Revocation allows the
administrator to limit the damage done by a rogue node or an
adversary who has control of the private key. With STAR certificates
expiration replaces revocation so there is a timeliness issue.
It should be noted that revocation also has timeliness issues,
because both CRLs and OCSP responses have nextUpdate fields that tell
RPs how long they should trust this revocation data. These fields
are typically set to hours, days, or even weeks in the future. Any
revocation that happens before the time in nextUpdate goes unnoticed
by the RP.
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Section 5.1 discusses the reasons why a certificate would be revoked
if revocation was available and how STAR certificates do the same.
Section 5.2 discusses considerations for setting the longevity of a
certificate, and Section 5.3 discusses how longevity should be
adjusted to deal with clock skew.
More discussion of the security of STAR certificates is available in
[Topalovic].
5.1. Reasons for Revocation
There are two types of compromise that require administrators to
revoke a certificate:
o A host has lost control of the private key. There are many ways
that this can happen: a host can be hacked and a file containing
the private key may or may not have been copied; a disk may be
replaced and the old one has not been securely disposed of; a
fault causes the private key to be erased. In all these cases we
would like to revoke the certificate to make sure an adversary
cannot use the private key for nefarious purposes. For STAR
certificates the only solution is to wait for the certificate to
expire and the system is vulnerable until that happens. Longevity
should be set so that this risk is acceptable.
o A host may begin doing unintended things, either due to a software
fault or due to a malicious takeover. Again without revocation
RPs will continue to trust this node until its certificate
expires.
When a node "goes rogue" or an adversary gets control of the private
key it is important to block renewal or these certificates or else
the attack can persist forever. No matter how short-term these short
term certificates are, there is a certain window of time when the
attacker can use the certificate. This can often be mitigated with
application-level measures.
With most systems relying parties are configured with the names of
nodes with which they are allowed to communicate. When revocation is
not available changing the configuration so that the rogue node
cannot connect is RECOMMENDED. This is useful even when revocation
is available because timeliness issues are common to both revocation
and expiration.
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5.2. Longevity and Revocation
There is always a period of time between when a compromise is
discovered and when RPs stop trusting the certificate. With
revocation this has to do with the time it takes to process the
revocation and the span of time between the thisUpdate and nextUpdate
fields. With STAR certificates this is controlled by the time it
takes to inhibit renewals and the longevity of the certificates.
For this reason it makes sense to set the longevity to a period of
time similar to the span of time that we would set for the CRL or
OCSP updates. Typically a few days is an appropriate time. For some
cases this can be as low as a few hours. Setting the renewal time
too short may cause operational problems as discussed in Section 4.3
and Section 4.2. In general longevity should not be set shorter than
the availability of the CA allows.
Fortunately modern hardware is powerful enough and reliable enough
that even a system with tens of thousands of end entities with
longevity of 1-2 days should not suffer an outage because of expired
certificates.
5.3. Clock Skew and Security
As discussed in Section 4.3 clock skew can lead to expired
certificates being treated as valid. While even the use of NTP may
leave clocks with a few seconds of inaccuracy, all installations MUST
take steps to limit the clock skew on their hosts.
An upper bound for the amount of skew allowed for hosts in a
particular system is one of the parameters for such a system. For
systems using NTP this can be 2 seconds. For systems where the
clocks are set manually, this tends to be far greater, but without an
upper bound no guarantees can be made about the security of
certificate use.
This upper bound is also a limit on the target certificate longevity.
For example, if hosts and CAs can each have a clock skew of 24 hours
then it is impossible to achieve a longevity of under 48 hours. With
a reasonable skew and a reasonable target longevity we can achieve
our security targets by reducing the certificate longevity by twice
the upper bound for skew. So if skew is bounded by 24 hours (the bad
timezone case) and target longevity is 7 days, it makes sense to set
the longevity on the CA to 5 days.
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5.4. CA availability
A successful Denial of Service (DoS) attack against a CA prevents it
from issuing certificates. With short-term certificates this could
quickly lead to outages as certificates expire.
The important period of time here is the time between when the EE
first attempts to renew the certificate and the time that the
certificate expires. For example, if the EE attempts to renew the
certificates a mere five minutes before expiration, then a five-
minute CA outage can lead to an invalid certificate and failed
connections.
This issue is no different from DoS attacks against the DP for
certificates with revocation. The methods of protection are also
similar:
o Certificate renewal should first be attempted plenty of time in
advance as recommended in Section 4.1. This will leave enough
time for administrators to deal with the attack.
o As for all important infrastructure, network defenses SHOULD be
deployed to mitigate DoS attacks.
6. IANA Considerations
There are no requests to IANA in this document.
7. References
7.1. 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>.
7.2. Informative References
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[cert-expires]
Lennon, M., "Google Lets SMTP Certificate Expire", April
2015, <http://www.securityweek.com/
google-lets-smtp-certificate-expire>.
[I-D.ietf-acme-acme]
Barnes, R., Hoffman-Andrews, J., and J. Kasten, "Automatic
Certificate Management Environment (ACME)", draft-ietf-
acme-acme-07 (work in progress), June 2017.
[I-D.ietf-acme-star]
Sheffer, Y., Lopez, D., Gonzalez de Dios, O., Pastor
Perales, A., and T. Fossati, "Use of Short-Term,
Automatically-Renewed (STAR) Certificates to Delegate
Authority over Web Sites", draft-ietf-acme-acme-07 (work
in progress), June 2017.
[I-D.ietf-anima-autonomic-control-plane]
Eckert, T., Behringer, M., and S. Bjarnason, "An Autonomic
Control Plane (ACP)", draft-ietf-anima-autonomic-control-
plane-13 (work in progress), December 2017.
[I-D.ietf-anima-bootstrapping-keyinfra]
Pritikin, M., Richardson, M., Behringer, M., Bjarnason,
S., and K. Watsen, "Bootstrapping Remote Secure Key
Infrastructures (BRSKI)", draft-ietf-anima-bootstrapping-
keyinfra-11 (work in progress), February 2018.
[I-D.ietf-anima-reference-model]
Behringer, M., Carpenter, B., Eckert, T., Ciavaglia, L.,
Pierre, P., Liu, B., Nobre, J., and J. Strassner, "A
Reference Model for Autonomic Networking", draft-ietf-
anima-reference-model-05 (work in progress), October 2017.
[I-D.ietf-anima-stable-connectivity]
Eckert, T. and M. Behringer, "Using Autonomic Control
Plane for Stable Connectivity of Network OAM", draft-ietf-
anima-stable-connectivity-10 (work in progress), February
2018.
[I-D.ietf-anima-voucher]
Watsen, K., Richardson, M., Pritikin, M., and T. Eckert,
"Voucher Profile for Bootstrapping Protocols", draft-ietf-
anima-voucher-07 (work in progress), January 2018.
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[I-D.ietf-netconf-zerotouch]
Watsen, K., Abrahamsson, M., and I. Farrer, "Zero Touch
Provisioning for Networking Devices", draft-ietf-netconf-
zerotouch-20 (work in progress), February 2018.
[RFC4806] Myers, M. and H. Tschofenig, "Online Certificate Status
Protocol (OCSP) Extensions to IKEv2", RFC 4806,
DOI 10.17487/RFC4806, February 2007,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4806>.
[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>.
[RFC5905] Mills, D., Martin, J., Ed., Burbank, J., and W. Kasch,
"Network Time Protocol Version 4: Protocol and Algorithms
Specification", RFC 5905, DOI 10.17487/RFC5905, June 2010,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5905>.
[RFC6066] Eastlake 3rd, D., "Transport Layer Security (TLS)
Extensions: Extension Definitions", RFC 6066,
DOI 10.17487/RFC6066, January 2011,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6066>.
[RFC6960] Santesson, S., Myers, M., Ankney, R., Malpani, A.,
Galperin, S., and C. Adams, "X.509 Internet Public Key
Infrastructure Online Certificate Status Protocol - OCSP",
RFC 6960, DOI 10.17487/RFC6960, June 2013,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6960>.
[RFC6961] Pettersen, Y., "The Transport Layer Security (TLS)
Multiple Certificate Status Request Extension", RFC 6961,
DOI 10.17487/RFC6961, June 2013,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6961>.
[RFC6962] Laurie, B., Langley, A., and E. Kasper, "Certificate
Transparency", RFC 6962, DOI 10.17487/RFC6962, June 2013,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6962>.
[RFC7030] Pritikin, M., Ed., Yee, P., Ed., and D. Harkins, Ed.,
"Enrollment over Secure Transport", RFC 7030,
DOI 10.17487/RFC7030, October 2013,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7030>.
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[RFC7296] Kaufman, C., Hoffman, P., Nir, Y., Eronen, P., and T.
Kivinen, "Internet Key Exchange Protocol Version 2
(IKEv2)", STD 79, RFC 7296, DOI 10.17487/RFC7296, October
2014, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7296>.
[RFC8192] Hares, S., Lopez, D., Zarny, M., Jacquenet, C., Kumar, R.,
and J. Jeong, "Interface to Network Security Functions
(I2NSF): Problem Statement and Use Cases", RFC 8192,
DOI 10.17487/RFC8192, July 2017,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8192>.
[Topalovic]
Topalovic, E., Saeta, B., Huang, L., Jackson, C., and D.
Boneh, "Towards Short-Lived Certificates", 2012,
<http://www.w2spconf.com/2012/papers/w2sp12-final9.pdf>.
Authors' Addresses
Yoav Nir
Dell EMC
9 Andrei Sakharov St
Haifa 3190500
Israel
EMail: ynir.ietf@gmail.com
Thomas Fossati
Nokia
EMail: thomas.fossati@nokia.com
Yaron Sheffer
Intuit
EMail: yaronf.ietf@gmail.com
Toerless Eckert
Huawei USA - Futurewei Technologies Inc.
2330 Central Expy
Santa Clara 95050
USA
EMail: tte+ietf@cs.fau.de
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