Hi everyone,

We are currently in the process of discussing different scenarios and 
approaches for the onboarding of (IoT) devices in plants, substations, or 
cloud-based services. The current BRSKI document provides here a good approach 
to address the case in which a pledge has an online connection to a domain 
registrar to request a voucher for enrolling in a target domain including the 
enrollment at the PKI. For the enrollment there exists the binding between the 
certification request (as PKCS#10 object) and the communication connection. I 
would see this as synchronous approach, as the interaction between the pledge 
and the domain registrar and also the PKI (CA) is based on a "live" 
communication connection.

Besides this, we see further use cases, in which the connection to the PKI is 
not always available. This may be the case if the connection to the CA is only 
temporary available or not directly available. Here, the approach would require 
a rather asynchronous handling. In such a setup the domain registrar could for 
instance store the object (certification request) and forward it upon 
connectivity to the PKI for further processing. The forward may be based on a 
communication connection or even manually. This asynchronous approach requires 
that the object itself is self-protecting ensuring its integrity (like a PKCS#7 
wrapping of the PKCS#10 request or similar). Based on the specified BRSKI 
features, we did not see the support for this type of requirements directly.

Before starting a discussion about potential solution approaches, I would like 
to get some sense, if this use case is also considered as target scenario for 
BRSKI. If yes, are there already ideas on how to address asynchronous objects? 
We already had some discussion in our group about potential approaches to 
handle such an requirement and I think it could be an interesting enhancement 
of a domain registrar to support both use cases, synchronous and asynchronous 
object processing. Since the domain registrar should be less restricted than 
the onboarding devices, the devices could have an option which approach to 
choose.
Any thought on this?

Best regards
Steffen

--
Steffen Fries
Siemens AG, Corporate Technology

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