Subject: [TLS] Re: Last Call: 'TLS User Mapping Extension' to Proposed Standard

From: Eric Rescorla <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 18 Feb 2006 17:31:13 -0800

BACKGROUND
This document describes an extension to TLS which allows the client to
give the server a hint (the User Principal Name) about which directory
entry to look up in order to verify the client's identity.

This works as follows:
1. The client offers the extension (called UME) in the 
   ClientHello message. 
2. The server accepts the extension.
3. The client sends the new HandshakeType to the server
   before sending its Certificate message.

The packet flow looks like this (cut-and-pasted from the draft):

      Client                                               Server

      ClientHello
       /* with user_mapping ext */ -------->

                                                      ServerHello
                                      /* with user-mapping ext */
                                                     Certificate*
                                               ServerKeyExchange*
                                              CertificateRequest*
                                   <--------      ServerHelloDone

-->   UserMappingDataList  
      Certificate*
      ClientKeyExchange
      CertificateVerify*
      [ChangeCipherSpec]
      Finished                     -------->
                                               [ChangeCipherSpec]
                                   <--------             Finished
      Application Data             <------->     Application Data

New handshake message marked by --> on the left.

This document was presented to the TLS WG in Vancouver and there was
only a very small amount of interest. The authors posted the -00 version
of their draft on January 10. Some minor comments were made by a single
WG member and these were addressed. The authors asked for a preliminary
code point assignment on January 14.  I provided a number of technical
comments (including suggesting an alternate approach, described below)
at that time, but was told that the implementation was already too far
along to be changed significantly.

Since the IETF would not have change control, this is an inappropriate
work item for the TLS WG and therefore the authors appear to have
decided on an Individual Submission. The reason for the intended status
of Proposed Standard is that this extension defines a new Handshake Type
and the TLS WG has decided that new Handshake Types require a Standards
Action (See S 7.4 of draft-ietf-tls-rfc2246-13, in RFC-Ed queue).

Contrary to the the Last Call announcement, the comments I raised
originally have not been addressed--except to be told they weren't
possible. For the reasons indicated below, I believe this document
should not be advanced to Proposed Standard as-is.

REVIEW COMMENTS
The obvious design here would simply be to place the information
in the UserMappingDataList (UMDL) message directly in the ClientHello
extension. The draft argues that this is bad for the following
reason:

   The reason the mapping data itself is not placed in the extension
   portion of the ClientHello is to prevent broadcasting this
   information to servers that don't understand the extension.
   Additionally, if new mapping information were to be considered
   confidential, the addition of a new handshake message allows the data
   to be encrypted using the servers public key.

   No other modifications to the protocol are required. The messages are
   detailed in the following sections.

This is unconvincing for a number of reasons. First, TLS handles the
case where an extension is not understood just fine. It's ignored. Since
the extension appears to be less than 100 bytes, there's no performance
issue.

The authors suggest that there is a security issue:

   As the client is the initiator of this TLS extension, it needs to
   determine when it is appropriate to send the User Mapping
   Information. It may not be prudent to broadcast this information to
   just any server at any time, as it can reveal network infrastructure
   the client and server are using.

      - The client SHOULD only send the UserMappingDataList handshake
        message if it is agreed upon in the Hello exchange, preventing
        the information from being sent to a server that doesn't
        understand the User Mapping Extension.

      - The client SHOULD further only send this information if the
        server belongs to a domain to which the client intends to
        authenticate using the UPN as identifier.

However, the second piece of information (the domain name of the server)
is generally available to the client prior to the connection initiation,
since it's used to look up the server's address. So, the client could
decide whether to send the UMDL data prior to handshake initiation.

One difference here is that the client now has the server's certificate
and that certificate could potentially contain some X.509 Extension that
indicated that the server was authorized to receive the UMDL
data. However, this is of very limited security value because in the
static RSA modes which are common with SSL/TLS, the server has not
proved possession of the corresponding private key at this point in the
handshake. Note that this draft does not describe any such extension.

An attacker who wished to impersonate the server in order to capture the
UMDL would be able to do so with a simple replay/cut-and-paste
attack. Moreover, because the UMDL is sent in the clear (the draft
claims that it could be encrypted but provides no facility for doing
so) any passive attacker can capture the UMDL by observing a single
handshake.	

At best this strategy stops the client from inadvertantly sending the
UMDL to a server which it *thinks* should support it (because it's
got the right domain name) but which actually doesn't (perhaps because
it's broken?). This seems to be of extremely limited value.

AN ALTERNATE DESIGN
There is an alternate design which has superior security properties
and does not involve defining a new HandshakeType. 

1. Do an ordinary TLS handshake without offering UME.
2. Initiate a TLS rehandshake and send the UMDL in an extension
   in the ClientHello.

Because the second TLS handshake is conducted over the TLS session
established in step (1), the entire UMDL extension exchange is
protected. A passive attacker cannot capture the UMDL data and an active
attacker cannot impersonate the server and force the transmission of the
UMDL. 

This approach has two (modest) drawbwacks.

1. It is slower because it requires two handshakes.
2. The client may have to authenticate twice (this is a special
   case of (1)).

The second case can be easily ameliorated by having the client send an
extension (empty UME?) in the first handshake as a signal that it wants
to do UMDL and that the server should hold off on demanding client
authentication until the rehandshake happens.

The performance issue is quite modest with modern servers.  Indeed, it's
quite common for web servers to do a first handshake without cert-based
client auth and then rehandshake with client auth if the client asks for
a sensitive page.

Note: there is an alternate design in which you do a client auth in the
first handshake and then do a resumption in the second one but do
UME. This is rather faster, both in terms of computation and round trips
but is technically precluded by S 2.3 of RFC3546 which requires ignoring
extensions if you do a resume. One could imagine relaxing this
restriction but that hasn't been done yet.

Note also that if the client isn't worried about the sensitivity of the
UMDL, then it can simply offer the UME extension with a UMDL in the
first handshake and skip the second handshake.

Another (hacky) approach would be for the client to probe the server
with an initial ClientHello (and no UME) and then abort the handshake
and restart if it decides that it likes the server and wants to do
UME. This would have equivalent security properties to this draft at the
cost of a single round trip.

SUMMARY
The technique described in this document appears to be of limited
usefulness. In particular, the lack of confidentiality for the
UMDL is a big limitation in extending it to other applications
than the one envisioned by Microsoft. There are alternate designs
which don't have those limitations and don't involve allocating a
new HandshakeType value. This document should not advance as a
Proposed Standard.

-Ekr

_______________________________________________
TLS mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/tls

---

From: "Steven M. Bellovin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 18 Feb 2006 22:32:13 -0500

In message <[email-masked]>, Eric Rescor
la writes:

>of Proposed Standard 

Do we have a process issue here?  Can we have a Proposed Standard
without the IETF having change control?  (2026 speaks of change control 
only in the context of a WG.)

		--Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb

---

From: Russ Housley <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 19 Feb 2006 14:27:06 -0500

Steve & Eric:

The document that is in Last Call gives the IETF complete change 
control.  There is no process issue.

Russ

---

From: "Ari Medvinsky" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Feb 2006 17:32:07 -0800

Eric,

Thank you for your feedback.  Below are the problems that I see with the
alternative proposals that you suggested when compared to the approach
taken in the current draft:

1)	Proposal 1:  Send the user mapping extension in the initial
Client Hello (as data along with the extension value).

	a) Problem: Privacy/Lack of user consent in information
disclosure.  The UPN sent in the user extension, uniquely identifies a
principal - something that users concerned with preserving their privacy
may object to (i.e., the large majority of SSL sites are server side
auth only; the user was anonymous and now the user is identified by the
UPN).

To mitigate this problem to some extent (as I think you pointed out),
the client can be configured to only send the user mapping information
to some subset of servers (e.g., based on domain names).  However, this
completely lacks end user consent.  The user's principal name will be
automatically sent to every SSL server in the above list (as configured
by admin) - even if the user does not wish to be identified to the
target server (in SSL sessions with server side auth only and mutual
auth).

In contrast, if the mapping extension is sent on the third leg before
the certificate msg (as it is in the current draft), the user has the
option to bail out of client auth and not disclose the UPN or any data
in the cert (e.g., by not typing the pin for the smartcard).

	b) Problem: Performance.  In your email you stated that the
UserMapping extension is likely to be around ~ 100 bytes and that's
negligible and thus it is ok to send in the initial ClientHello msg -
even if the server does not need it as is the case for server side auth
only TLS connections.

I disagree.  As you know TLS is used in many different scenarios, for
example:  EAP/TLS  (RFC http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2716.txt) is used for
Radius, wireless 802.1x, RAS (dial up), etc.  The MTU in EAP is 1600
bytes.  Thus even 100 bytes can cause additional fragmentation causing
additional latency for RAS (consider dial up across geographically
dispersed end points).  Furthermore, per the current draft the
userMapping structure can be extended, to carry multiple user mapping
hints, thus causes further degradation in this scenario ...

2)	Proposal 2:  

This is essentially saying that the current extensibility mechanism in
TLS is broken and that the userMapping extension in contrast to all
other extension requires to 2 handshakes instead of one.   The method
that you are proposing is inconsistent with the approach used for every
other TLS extension.  

>From a performance standpoint, proposal 2 is still a bad choice.  You
stated that "The performance issue is quite modest with modern servers".
While servers are getting faster, user load tends to follow suit;
furthermore, this proposal costs additional latency.  In contrast, the
approach used in the current draft does not suffer from these problems. 

Regards,

-Ari

-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Rescorla [mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: Saturday, February 18, 2006 5:31 PM
To: [email-masked]
Cc: [email-masked]; [email-masked]
Subject: [TLS] Re: Last Call: 'TLS User Mapping Extension' to
ProposedStandard

BACKGROUND

This works as follows:

      Client                                               Server

      ClientHello

                                                      ServerHello

-->   UserMappingDataList
      Certificate*
      ClientKeyExchange
      CertificateVerify*
      [ChangeCipherSpec]
      Finished                     -------->
                                               [ChangeCipherSpec]
                                   <--------             Finished

REVIEW COMMENTS
The obvious design here would simply be to place the information in the
UserMappingDataList (UMDL) message directly in the ClientHello
extension. The draft argues that this is bad for the following
reason:

One difference here is that the client now has the server's certificate
and that certificate could potentially contain some X.509 Extension that
indicated that the server was authorized to receive the UMDL data.
However, this is of very limited security value because in the static
RSA modes which are common with SSL/TLS, the server has not proved
possession of the corresponding private key at this point in the
handshake. Note that this draft does not describe any such extension.

An attacker who wished to impersonate the server in order to capture the
UMDL would be able to do so with a simple replay/cut-and-paste attack.
Moreover, because the UMDL is sent in the clear (the draft claims that
it could be encrypted but provides no facility for doing
so) any passive attacker can capture the UMDL by observing a single
handshake.	

At best this strategy stops the client from inadvertantly sending the
UMDL to a server which it *thinks* should support it (because it's got
the right domain name) but which actually doesn't (perhaps because it's
broken?). This seems to be of extremely limited value.

AN ALTERNATE DESIGN
There is an alternate design which has superior security properties and
does not involve defining a new HandshakeType. 

Note: there is an alternate design in which you do a client auth in the
first handshake and then do a resumption in the second one but do UME.
This is rather faster, both in terms of computation and round trips but
is technically precluded by S 2.3 of RFC3546 which requires ignoring
extensions if you do a resume. One could imagine relaxing this
restriction but that hasn't been done yet.

Another (hacky) approach would be for the client to probe the server
with an initial ClientHello (and no UME) and then abort the handshake
and restart if it decides that it likes the server and wants to do UME.
This would have equivalent security properties to this draft at the cost
of a single round trip.

SUMMARY
The technique described in this document appears to be of limited
usefulness. In particular, the lack of confidentiality for the UMDL is a
big limitation in extending it to other applications than the one
envisioned by Microsoft. There are alternate designs which don't have
those limitations and don't involve allocating a new HandshakeType
value. This document should not advance as a Proposed Standard.

-Ekr

---

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 21 Feb 2006 15:28:15 +0200

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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...

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.

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.

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".

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...

Best regards,
Pasi

---

From: Russ Housley <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Feb 2006 19:34:26 -0500

>information to fetch authentication/authorization-related information

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.

>e.g., the information is sent encrypted, and only after the server has

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.

>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.

>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.

>is used, in which case the user mapping information would be

I agree with this assessment.

>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.

>think vendors should be encouraged to publish their extensions, even

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.

>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.

>minor process details would exactly "make the Internet work better".

We agree on this point.

>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