DANE Authentication for Network Clients Everywhere (dance)

WG Name DANE Authentication for Network Clients Everywhere
Acronym dance
Area Security Area (sec)
State Active
Charter charter-ietf-dance-01 Approved
Document dependencies
Additional resources GitHub Organization
Zulip stream
Personnel Chairs Joey Salazar, Wes Hardaker
Area Director Paul Wouters
Mailing list Address dance@ietf.org
To subscribe https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dance
Archive https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/dance/
Chat Room address https://zulip.ietf.org/#narrow/stream/dance

Charter for Working Group

Objective

The DANE Authentication for Network Clients Everywhere (DANCE) WG seeks to extend DANE (RFC 6698) to encompass TLS client authentication using certificates or Raw Public Keys (RPK).

Problem Statement

The process of establishing trust in public-key-authenticated identity typically involves the use of a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), and a shared PKI root of trust between the parties exchanging public keys. A Certification Authority (CA) is one example of a root of trust for a PKI, which can be then used for establishing trust in certified public keys.

The DNS namespace, together with DNSSEC, forms the most widely-recognized namespace and authenticated lookup mechanism on the Internet.
DANE built on this authenticated lookup mechanism to enable public key-based TLS authentication which is resilient to impersonation, but only for TLS server identities.
However, the DANE WG did not define authentication for TLS client identities.

In response to the challenges related to ambiguity between identically named identities issued by different CAs, application owners frequently choose to onboard client identities to a single private PKI with a limited CA set that is specific to that vertical. This creates a silo effect where different parts of large deployments can not communicate. Examples of where DANCE could be useful includes SMTP transport client authentication, authentication of DNS authoritative server to server zone file transfers over TLS, authentication to DNS recursive servers, and Internet of Things (IoT) device identification.

Scope of work

DANCE will specify the DANE-enabled TLS client authentication use cases and an architecture describing the primary components and interaction patterns.

DANCE will define how DNS DANE records will represent client identities for TLS connections.

DANCE will coordinate with the TLS working group to define any TLS protocol updates required to support client authentication using DANE.

The DANCE scope of work will be initially limited to just TLS client authentication. Future work may include using client identifiers for other tasks including object security, or authenticating to other protocols.

Deliverables:

  • DANCE architecture and use cases (e.g., IoT, SMTP client,
    authentication to DNS services) document (9 months)

  • DANE client authentication and publication practices (6 months after architecture)

  • A TLS extension to indicate DANE identification capability and the
    client's DANE identity name (6 months after architecture)

Milestones

Date Milestone Associated documents
Jan 2023 TLS extension to indicate DANE identification capability and the client's DANE identity name to WGLC (PS)
Jan 2023 DANE client authentication and publication practice to WGLC (PS)
Jul 2022 DANCE architecture and use cases to WGLC (informational)