Pasi:
My personal comments about draft-santesson-tls-ume-01:
The draft defines an extension to TLS that allows the client to send
"user mapping" information to the TLS server. The server uses this
information to fetch authentication/authorization-related information
from a directory server.
I do not think this is a good summary of the purpose of this
document. Currently in the Microsoft environment, a
Microsoft-specific certificate extension that contains the username
is required. This extension allows certificates without this
Microsoft-specific extension to be used. The document refers to
these as "legacy" certificates. In fact, these are the certificates
that are in common use in many large enterprises.
The draft is quite similar to draft-housley-tls-authz-extns, which
allows sending X.509 attribute certificates and SAML assertions in
TLS. The main difference seems to be that we only send a pointer to
the authorization information (a bit like IKEv2, which supports
sending an URL of the certificate instead of the cert itself). From a
purely technical point of view, it would probably make sense to merge
these drafts. The tls-authz-extns draft does some details better:
e.g., the information is sent encrypted, and only after the server has
been authenticated.
Based on the comments that I received from Eric Rescorla on
draft-housley-tls-authz-extns, this draft is likely to move in a
somewhat different direction; however, that is a discussion for a
different thread.
The solution is also quite similar to the "client_certificate_url"
extension defined in RFC 3546 (the "User Principal Name" could be
considered as one type of certificate URL). Here even the placement
of the handshake messages is identical to tls-ume. Unfortunately,
it seems that sending both CertificateURL and Certificate handshake
messages is not allowed, complicating the situation.
The change proposed here would require action by the TLS WG. And,
this alternative approach was not raised at the Vancouver IETF when
this solution was presented to the TLS WG.
However, it might be that process and timing issues make mergers
infeasible. Also, the authors of draft-santesson-tls-ume seem to
be unwilling to make changes to the protocol.
This is not the case. I raised a significant concern when I did my
AD review, and after discussion of several alternative solutions,
they picked one and changed the document. I understand that they are
also changing their implementation to match the document.
About the technical details: In general, the solution seems to work,
and does not contain any serious flaws. I don't count sending the user
mapping information unencrypted as a serious flaw -- this information
is sent only when a client certificate is also sent, and the client
certificate is not encrypted either (unless the double-handshake hack
is used, in which case the user mapping information would be
encrypted, too).
I agree with this assessment.
It's probably not the most elegant design possible (see e.g. Eric
Rescorla's review).
However, I think we should clearly "distinguish between 'it won't
work' and 'it could/should work better'" (as Dave Crocker well put it
in one email). The document solves a real (but maybe not extremely
large or important) problem, and the solution works. That's better
than many documents these days...
I think that the folks that are using enterprise PKIs would like to
see this capability, and Microsoft is prepared to make it available in Vista.
Given these, I think this would be an excellent document for
Informational, especially if the title was changed to "Microsoft TLS
User Mapping Extension" to indicate that it's a proprietary extension
where the IETF community had no chance to change anything. I also
think vendors should be encouraged to publish their extensions, even
if they are not perfect.
I disagree with this point. When I did my AD review, I considered
the Microsoft-specific nature of the document. The structure easily
accommodates additional name forms. Thus, I do not think we should
ask for "Microsoft" in the document title.
However, due to the IANA allocation rules in 2246bis, this draft is
being last called for standards track, and this is slightly more
problematic.
One observation is that the TLS allocation rules are quite strict, and
not always totally logical. "Specification Required" is sufficient to
get a ClientCertificateType number, and "IETF Consensus" gets you an
ExtensionType number. But many extensions (including this one, and
also some of the extensions in 3546bis) also require a handshake
message number, and thus Standards Track. Or in other words: the
degree of consensus and process required for a document that extends
TLS depends heavily on minor technical details, not on what the
extension actually does.
RFC 2026 also says that "A Proposed Standard specification is
generally stable, has resolved known design choices, is believed to be
well-understood, has received significant community review, and
appears to enjoy enough community interest to be considered valuable."
I don't think we're quite there yet with this document.
We need to strike a balance. In this case, Microsoft is trying to
follow the IANA allocation rules in 2246bis. We do not want to
punish them for trying to be good IETF participants.
On the other hand, I also think that just refusing to publish this
document would be a highly unproductive approach. If the document
solves a reasonable problem, the solution works, and it looks likely
it will be widely deployed, I don't think preventing publication on
minor process details would exactly "make the Internet work better".
We agree on this point.
I'm not sure what would be the best way to handle this, though. Merge
this with draft-housley-tls-authz-extns? Refine the technical details
so that it does not need a new handshake message number? (E.g., map the
UPN to an URL, and use the existing CertificateURL message?) Change the
IANA allocation rules for TLS? I don't have a strong opinion here...
Since the direction for draft-housley-tls-authz-extns remains
unclear, I do not think we should delay draft-santesson-tls-ume while
the other document gets sorted out.
Russ
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf