Support for Short-Term, Automatically Renewed (STAR) Certificates in the Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME)
RFC 8739
Document | Type |
RFC - Proposed Standard
(March 2020; No errata)
Was draft-ietf-acme-star (acme WG)
|
|
---|---|---|---|
Authors | Yaron Sheffer , Diego Lopez , Oscar de Dios , Antonio Pastor , Thomas Fossati | ||
Last updated | 2020-03-11 | ||
Replaces | draft-sheffer-acme-star | ||
Stream | IETF | ||
Formats | plain text html xml pdf htmlized bibtex | ||
Reviews | |||
Stream | WG state | Submitted to IESG for Publication | |
Document shepherd | Rich Salz | ||
Shepherd write-up | Show (last changed 2019-08-21) | ||
IESG | IESG state | RFC 8739 (Proposed Standard) | |
Action Holders |
(None)
|
||
Consensus Boilerplate | Yes | ||
Telechat date | |||
Responsible AD | Roman Danyliw | ||
Send notices to | Rich Salz <rsalz@akamai.com> | ||
IANA | IANA review state | Version Changed - Review Needed | |
IANA action state | RFC-Ed-Ack | ||
IANA expert review state | Expert Reviews OK | ||
IANA expert review comments | The registrations in version -10 are approved. |
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Y. Sheffer Request for Comments: 8739 Intuit Category: Standards Track D. Lopez ISSN: 2070-1721 O. Gonzalez de Dios A. Pastor Perales Telefonica I+D T. Fossati ARM March 2020 Support for Short-Term, Automatically Renewed (STAR) Certificates in the Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) Abstract Public key certificates need to be revoked when they are compromised, that is, when the associated private key is exposed to an unauthorized entity. However, the revocation process is often unreliable. An alternative to revocation is issuing a sequence of certificates, each with a short validity period, and terminating the sequence upon compromise. This memo proposes an Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) extension to enable the issuance of Short-Term, Automatically Renewed (STAR) X.509 certificates. Status of This Memo This is an Internet Standards Track document. This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It represents the consensus of the IETF community. It has received public review and has been approved for publication by the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). Further information on Internet Standards is available in Section 2 of RFC 7841. Information about the current status of this document, any errata, and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8739. Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2020 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 (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 1.1. Name Delegation Use Case 1.2. Terminology 1.3. Conventions Used in This Document 2. Protocol Flow 2.1. Bootstrap 2.2. Auto Renewal 2.3. Termination 3. Protocol Details 3.1. ACME Extensions 3.1.1. Extending the Order Resource 3.1.2. Canceling an Auto-renewal Order 3.2. Capability Discovery 3.3. Fetching the Certificates 3.4. Negotiating an Unauthenticated GET 3.5. Computing notBefore and notAfter of STAR Certificates 3.5.1. Example 4. Operational Considerations 4.1. The Meaning of "Short Term" and the Impact of Skewed Clocks 4.2. Impact on Certificate Transparency (CT) Logs 4.3. HTTP Caching and Dependability 5. IANA Considerations 5.1. New Registries 5.2. New Error Types 5.3. New Fields in Order Objects 5.4. Fields in the "auto-renewal" Object within an Order Object 5.5. New Fields in the "meta" Object within a Directory Object 5.6. Fields in the "auto-renewal" Object within a Directory Metadata Object 5.7. Cert-Not-Before and Cert-Not-After HTTP Headers 6. Security Considerations 6.1. No Revocation 6.2. Denial-of-Service Considerations 6.3. Privacy Considerations 7. References 7.1. Normative References 7.2. Informative References Acknowledgments Authors' Addresses 1. Introduction The ACME protocol [RFC8555] automates the process of issuing a certificate to a named entity (an Identifier Owner or IdO). Typically, but not always, the identifier is a domain name. If the IdO wishes to obtain a string of short-term certificates originating from the same private key (see [TOPALOVIC] about why using short-lived certificates might be preferable to explicit revocation), she must go through the whole ACME protocol each time a new short-term certificate is needed, e.g., every 2-3 days. If done this way, the process would involve frequent interactions between the registration function of the ACME Certification Authority (CA) and the identity provider infrastructure (e.g., DNS, web servers), therefore making the issuance of short-term certificates exceedingly dependent on the reliability of both. This document presents an extension of the ACME protocol thatShow full document text