Colleagues - I have updated the proposed charter to reflect the discussion (see below). All the best. Tim.
The Web PKI is the set of systems and procedures most commonly used to protect the confidentiality, integrity and authenticity of communications between Web browsers and Web content servers. It first appeared in 1993 or thereabouts and has developed continuously in a somewhat organic fashion since then. Across all the suppliers and the point releases of their products, there are now hundreds of variations on the Web PKI in regular use. And this can be a source of problems both for end-users and certificate issuers. For end-users, there is no clear view whether certificate "problems" remain when they see indication of a "good" connection. For instance, in some browsers, a "good" indication may be displayed when a "revoked" response has been received and "accepted" by the user. Whereas, other browsers may refuse to display the contents under these circumstances. And for issuers, it can be difficult to predict what proportion of the user population will accept a certificate chain with certain characteristics. For instance, when a browser includes a nonce in an OCSP request but the server supplies a response that does not include the nonce, it is hard to know which browsers will accept and which will reject the response. Starting from the premise that more consistency in Web security behavior is desirable, a natural first step would be to document current and historic browser and server behavior. But, such a project has to be bounded. Therefore, only behavior encountered in more than 0.1 percent of connections made by desktop and mobile browsers should be considered. While it is not intended to apply the threshold with any precision, it may be used to justify the inclusion or exclusion of a technique. Future activities may attempt to prescribe how the Web PKI "should" work, and the prescription may turn out to be a proper subset of the PKIX PKI. However, that task is explicitly not a goal of the proposed working group. Instead, the group's goal is merely to describe how the Web PKI "actually" works in the set of browsers and servers that are in common use today. Additionally, a number of applications (such as document signing, code signing, and email) may use the same trust anchors and certificate-handling libraries as the ones used by the Web. Nevertheless, they may use the results in a way that is visibly different from the way in which the Web uses them. Therefore, these applications are explicitly out of scope for the working group. Also, the reliability of the Web PKI depends critically on the practices of its certificate issuers. However, the topic of practices is outside the scope of the IETF. Therefore, this will be left to other competent bodies. That there are technical shortcomings with Web PKI, as it is practiced today, is well recognized. And, that there is also some urgency in addressing these shortcomings is also well recognized. But, it is felt that too much haste can be counter-productive. The expectation is that the work of this group will bring to light, in a systematic way, aspects of the Web PKI that should be progressed in future working groups of the IETF's Security Area, and that suppliers will be willing to participate in those working groups and modify their products to comply with their standards. Given the urgency of the required developments and the scale of the task, it is agreed that adherence to the published schedule should take precedence over completeness of the results. Milestones ======== 1. First WG draft of "trust model" document (4 months). 2. First WG draft of "certificate, CRL, and OCSP field and extension processing" document (12 months). 3. First WG draft of "Web-server / CA communications" document (4 months). 4. First WG draft of "certificate revocation" document (8 months). 5. First WG draft of "TLS stack operation" document (8 months). 6. IESG submission of "trust model" document (16 months). 7. IESG submission of "certificate, CRL, and OCSP field and extension processing" document (24 months). 8. IESG submission of "Web-server / CA communications" document (16 months). 9. IESG submission of "certificate revocation" document (20 months). 10. IESG submission of "TLS stack operation" document (16 months). T: +1 613 270 3183
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