TLSWG,

I'd like some feedback on a potential issue raised by Martin Thomson at the
last IETF. The question is about the interaction between the SPKI and the
signature scheme for RSA delegated credentials. The main concern is around
the interaction between the rsaEncryption OID and the signature scheme,
specifically PKCS#1v1.5, which we disallow in TLS 1.3 but not explicitly in
DCs (yet). This issue is tracked on Github as issues/28
<https://github.com/tlswg/tls-subcerts/issues/28>.

Given the feedback on Github, I see two main choices to resolve this issue:

1) Allow RSA Credentials with the rsaEncryption OID in the SPKI to be used
with the rsa_pss_rsae_* signature schemes, but disallow rsa_pkcs1_*
signature schemes.
2) Forbid RSA Credentials with the rsaEncryption OID (and associated
signature schemes) and require an RSA PSS OIDs for rsa_pss_pss_* signature
schemes.

Does anyone have a strong preference for one of these options?

My take:
The rsa_pss_rsae_* suites are a hack created to allow TLS 1.3 to be
backward-compatible with existing rsaEncryption OID certs while enabling
RSA-PSS. We don't have this legacy in delegated credentials, so I'm
inclined to prefer 2).

The only reason I see to go for 1) is the risk of implementation
difficulties. The RSA PSS OIDs are hard to get right in code. However,
considering that RSA DCs are unlikely to be widely used in favor of
elliptic-curve DCs, the implementation risk seems low and restricted to
implementations who choose to support RSA DCs as an optional feature.

Nick
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