[http-state] draft-salgueiro-secure-state-management-04.txt

[Gonzalo Salgueiro <[e-mail]>]

Folks,

We just published a significantly revised version of the secure state management draft that we had been working on.  The new draft can be found here:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-salgueiro-secure-state-management-04
 
We had received mixed feedback before, but it seemed there were two recurring themes:
·         We wanted to move away from cookies for secure state management, though perhaps continuing to use cookies as a means of identifying the remote user agent
·         We need to have a solution that works over HTTP that does not require the use of Diffie-Hellman
 
We took a step back to look at the problem we were trying to solve.  What we want is to ensure that a request coming from a client could be trusted, even if transmitted over HTTP.  So, what we wanted really wasn’t a secure cookie, but a guarantee that the request is genuine.
 
With this draft, we’ve moved away from cookies and focus on only providing message authentication.  To provide message authentication, we still establish an association between the client and server.  We still allow for Diffie-Hellman to be used, but we have a mechanism in place to allow HTTPS to be used for the sole purpose of establishing associations, too.  The end result is that, with this draft, we can provide message integrity and we can avoid replay of messages.
 
We invite you to look at this revised draft and provide us with feedback.

Warm Regards,

Gonzalo