On 7 July 2014 16:57, Doug Beattie <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Mon, Jul 7, 2014 at 10:14 AM, Ben Laurie <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On 5 July 2014 19:34, Carl Wallace <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>> From:  Stephen Kent <[email protected]>
>>> Date:  Saturday, July 5, 2014 at 8:50 AM
>>> To:  Ben Laurie <[email protected]>
>>> Cc:  "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
>>> Subject:  Re: [Trans] Using a Precertificate Signing Certificate to sign
>>> TBScertificates for CT
>>>
>>> >
>>> >      On 1 July 2014 18:34, Stephen Kent <[email protected]>
>>> ><mailto:[email protected]> wrote:
>>> >          ...
>>> >
>>> >As you point out, the log can relax validation rules, which deals with
>>> >this problem (and we do, indeed, do that in our implementation).
>>> >
>>> >
>>> >
>>> >        My comments noted that relaxing rules in an unspecified fashion
>>> >creates
>>> >potential
>>> >problems for those submitting pre-certs. The specific changes needed to
>>> >enable
>>> >acceptance oif pre-certs need to be spelled out.
>>> >
>>> >
>>> >
>>> >      Hmm. What we do is check the signatures validate all the way up
>>> > the
>>> >chain. That's it. I'm not sure we need anything tighter than that, so
>>> >I guess we could specify that?
>>> >
>>> >
>>> >    Ok, that's what you do, but 5280 describes a long list of
>>> >    cert path validation rules
>>> >    and your doc just says that these can be relaxed. It does not
>>> >    prohibit a log from
>>> >    performing  the full set dictated by PKIX and X.509 path validation
>>> >    procedures, nor
>>> >    does it provide guidance of which subset SHOULD/MUST be performed.
>>> >    Absent such guidance
>>> >    different log operators can legitimately perform different checks,
>>> >    resulting in chaos.
>>> >
>>>
>>> Seems easy enough to specify and justify the relaxed rules (signature
>>> checking only) for this application but is it worth supporting the
>>> highlighting of errors, like name constraint violations, to draw the
>>> attention of log monitors?  An indication could probably be represented
>>> as
>>> a CTExtension.
>>
>>
>> Seems to me that it would be better to share the rules for checking such
>> things (ideally as open source software) than to have people rely on third
>> parties to correctly flag...
>
>
> I’m not connecting the logic from the last couple of emails.  We know that
> path validation *cannot* follow PKIX and path validation procedures  because
> when a Pre-certificate signing certificate is used the Issuer DN, AIA and
> Auth Key ID will *all* not correctly point to the pre-certificate.
>
>
> We need to change “may” to “must” in this parenthetical note in 3.1:
>
>    “(note that the log may relax standard validation rules to allow this, so
> long as the issued certificate will be valid),”
>
> and we need to specify exactly which rules can be relaxed.

As I've said, any rules can be relaxed - inclusion in the log says
nothing about the validity of certificates. Clearly there are some
rules that MUST be relaxed, and I guess we can attempt to enumerate
them.

> The use of pre-signing certificates is a good thing from a security
> perspective.  It lets you off-load the external communications from you CA
> and you can locate this in a different security zone in your infrastructure
> with different security requirements.  Specifying how log operators handle
> these chains is essential or the ability to obtain SCTs will vary from one
> log operator to another.

I don't think we can make that impossible - for example, what is the
definitive set of CAs that all logs should accept?

>
>>
>>>
>>>
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