Re: [Danish] Charter Text and the Problem Statement

[Ash Wilson <[e-mail]>]

Hi Hannes,
Thanks for the questions, and apologies for keeping you waiting on
answers/clarification.

On Wed, Jun 16, 2021 at 4:12 AM Hannes Tschofenig <[e-mail]>
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
>
>
> I have been reading through the charter text in an attempt to understand
> the problem statement.
>
>
>
> Two problems are mentioned:
>
>
>
> 1)  Challenges with naming collisions in the IoT space.
>
>
>
> 2)  Credential issuance is time consuming.
>
>
>
> Ad 1: Reading through the text it feels like naming collisions are a big thing in IoT. I have not heard about those problems. Could you elaborate?
>
> Certainly. I'll use a hospital as an example environment.

Within a hospital, it is desirable to implement 802.1x authentication using
EAP-TLS for access to protected networks. EAP-TLS enables the use of
PKI-based identity to authenticate an entity for network access.

When implementing EAP-TLS for network access, RADIUS is a common
protocol/server used for authentication behind the switch or wireless
access point. Guidance for configuring RADIUS recommends the use of only
one CA certificate for authenticating supplicant certificates. This
guidance can be found in the wild in Freeradius configuration files for
EAP-TLS, related to the 'ca_file' configuration directive.

CAs guarantee the uniqueness of an entity's name within the scope of the
CA, but have no method for enforcing name uniqueness across other CAs. For
instance, CA1 and CA2 may both sign certificates for entities with the same
name. If CA1 and CA2 are both trusted by the RADIUS server, and two
entities named "medicaldevice123" exist, one per CA, then the resulting
ambiguity makes it difficult to appropriately apply access controls. This
ambiguity is mitigated by operating a single organizational PKI, and
requiring identities issued by that single organizational PKI for EAP-TLS
authentication.

Onboarding devices to organizational PKI requires time and effort.
Oftentimes some sort of skilled labor and/or dedicated infrastructure for
automating the onboarding process is involved. DANE allows us to bind a DNS
name to a public key, and mitigates the ambiguities introduced by the use
of multiple CAs. An organization can only issue working identities within
its own namespace in DNS. Since naming ambiguity can be mitigated using
DANE, we may now choose to use manufacturer-issued PKI, represented in DNS,
for authenticating entities.

>From the hospital's standpoint, the IT staff no longer needs to manage the
process of onboarding devices to organizational PKI. The device arrives
on-site with an identity which can be immediately used for
network authentication.

> You add that “In response to the challenges related to
>
> ambiguity between identities issued by different CAs, application owners
>
> frequently choose to onboard IoT devices to a single CA.”. Is that a good or a bad development?
>
> It is a good development if the organization really wants to directly
manage all of the credentials for all of the application participants. The
effort and rationale behind BRSKI (RFC 8995) suggests a desire to make
onboarding to organizational PKI easier to automate.

If a supplier issues a trustworthy identity for a device, and DNS prevents
another PKI from issuing working credentials under the same name, then
issuing another identity via organizational PKI becomes superfluous. This
is where we think that time and effort can be saved, because the skills
required for onboarding do not need to include the management and issuance
of identities under organizational PKI.

>
>
> Ad 2: Is it really true that credential issuance is time consuming? Why is
> that? For whom is it time consuming?
>
Credential issuance very often requires the device and the person
bootstrapping the identity to be in the same place. Some platforms and
protocols exist to make that process easier (like BRSKI) or less
human-involving. The time investment seems to be on the part of both the
manufacturer (in issuing the IDevID) as well as the organizational IT
staff, who manage the organizational PKI.

>
>
> Ciao
>
> Hannes
>
>
>
> PS: You use the term “Certificate Authority (CA)”. It is actually called
> “Certification Authority”.
>
>
>
>
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-- 

*Ash Wilson* | Technical Director
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