Hi,
In reviewing the messages around the threats to the syslog protocol, it
appears that the priority of threats is as follows:
Primary:
Modification
Disclosure
Masquerading
Secondary:
Message stream modification
Not highly considered:
DoS
Traffic Analysis
Disclosure has been controversial in the discussions. It has been noted
that syslog messages are freeform text and the possibility of sending
sensitive information will always exist. This is all the more true if
high levels of debugging are enabled.
Also from the list, it appears that the use of TLS is supported and will
address these threats. I will ask for volunteers to write
syslog-protocol-tls and get it through the process.
It looks like syslog-protocol and syslog-transport-udp are very close to
being finished. I'd like to wrap those up and fully concentrate on
syslog-transport-tls, syslog-sign, and syslog-device-mib.
syslog-transport-tls will have to go through the process at the same time
as syslog-protocol and syslog-transport-udp. I'll ask Rainer and Anton to
please be patient while we complete this final document.
With that, I'll propose the following Charter revision and Milestones.
---vvv---
Syslog is a de-facto standard for logging system events. However, the
protocol component of this event logging system has not been formally
documented. While the protocol has been very useful and scalable, it has
some known security problems which were documented in the INFORMATIONAL
RFC 3164.
The goal of this working group is to address the security and integrity
problems, and to standardize the syslog protocol, transport, and a select
set of mechanisms in a manner that considers the ease of migration between
and the co-existence of existing versions and the standard.
Reviews have shown that there are very few similarities between the
message formats generated by heterogeneous systems. In fact, the only
consistent commonality between messages is that all of them contain the
<PRI> at the start. Additional testing has shown that as long as the
<PRI> is present in a syslog message, all tested receivers will accept any
generated message as a valid syslog message. In designing a standard
syslog message format, this Working Group will retain the <PRI> at the
start of the message and will introduce protocol versioning. Along these
same lines, many different charsets have been used in syslog messages
observed in the wild but no indication of the charset has been given in
any message. The Working Group also feels that multiple charsets will not
be beneficial to the community; much code would be needed to distinguish
and interpret different charsets. For compatibility with existing
implementations, the Working Group will allow that messages may still be
sent that do not indicate the charset used. However, the Working Group
will recommend that messages contain a way to identify the charset used
for the message, and will also recommend a single default charset.
syslog has traditionally been transported over UDP and this WG has already
defined RFC 3195 for the reliable transport for the syslog messages. The
WG will separate the UDP transport from the protocol so that others may
define additional transports in the future.
The threats that this WG will primarily address are modification,
disclosure, and masquerading. A secondary threat is message stream
modification. Threats that will not be addressed by this WG are DoS and
traffic analysis. The primary attacks may be thwarted by a secure
transport. However, it must be remembered that a great deal of the
success of syslog has been attributed to its ease of implementation and
relatively low maintenance level. The Working Group will consider those
factors, as well as current implementations, when deciding upon a secure
transport. The secondary threat of message stream modification can be
addressed by a mechanism that will verify the end-to-end integrity and
sequence of messages. The Working Group feels that these aspects may be
addressed by a dissociated signature upon sent messages.
- A document will be produced that describes a standardized syslog
protocol. A mechanism will also be defined in this document
that will provide a means to convey structured data.
- A document will be produced that describes a standardized UDP
transport for syslog.
- A document will be produced that requires a secure transport for the
delivery of syslog messages.
- A document will be produced to describe the MIB for syslog entities.
- A document will be produced that describes a standardized mechanism
to sign syslog messages to provide integrity checking and source
authentication.
Milestones:
Nov 2006 Submit Syslog Protocol to the IESG for consideration as a
PROPOSED STANDARD.
Nov 2006 Submit Syslog UDP Transport Mapping to the IESG for
consideration as a PROPOSED STANDARD.
Nov 2006 Submit Syslog TLS Transport Mapping to the IESG for
consideration as a PROPOSED STANDARD.
Nov 2006 Submit Syslog Device MIB to IESG for consideration as a
PROPOSED STANDARD.
Nov 2006 Submit a document that defines a message signing and
ordering mechanism to the IESG for consideration as a
PROPOSED STANDARD
---^^^---
Thanks,
Chris
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