Re: [TLS] Certificate Transparency for Client certificate in MTLS handshake

[Ryan Sleevi <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, May 10, 2021 at 9:43 AM Mohit Sahni <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Hi Ryan,
> Thanks for answering my question in a lot of detail. I asked this
> question in the context of a private PKI for client certificates. You
> can assume a scenario where the client certificates are issued to
> users/devices in an organization from a self service portal by the
> organization's existing private PKI for 1000s of users under different
> domains (multiple CAs).
>
> What I get from your answer is that using CT for client certificates
> makes sense when:
>
> 1) There is an existing private PKI.
> 2) There are multiple CAs issuing the client certificates.
> 3) The PKI uses non Web PKI (non public) CT log servers and auditors.
>
> I don't agree with your comment about following the same priority
> preferences that exist for server certificates, the [2] and [3] makes
> more sense when reversed or kept at an equal priority in the context
> of client certificates. Here is my reasoning:
> In the server PKI, it is practically easier to make changes in the web
> servers to support [2]  (i.e. sending the SCT extension by pre
> fetching the data from the CA) but it may not be that easier to
> implement it on 100s of thousands of client devices. Imagine a large
> cell phone manufacturer implementing [2] for all the devices that they
> have sold in the last 10 years.
>

Right, I can understand the temptation to consider OCSP Stapling as a more
attractive solution, because it relies on the CA taking the requisite
action, and thus avoids the need for client implementation, in theory. But
the problem is that it's largely "in theory" - that is, robust OCSP
stapling is just as hard for clients to implement as obtaining SCTs
directly.

Nearly 6 years ago, I wrote up [1] to discuss what robust OCSP stapling
looks like, from the server side, which captures some of the challenges
here. Few servers robustly support this (I believe Microsoft IIS and the
Caddy web server are the two notable exceptions), and so the idea of
pushing that all to clients is roughly the same challenge as having clients
obtain SCTs directly. The main argument for OCSP-embedding over
TLS-embedding is not one of simplicity, but of centralized control and
communication: the idea being that you can have all your clients contact a
single point of contact (the CA's OCSP responder) to obtain the policy.

For servers, in the context of the Web PKI, it's quite appealing to swap
priority for OCSP-embedding over TLS-embedding because of this. It equally
gives Web PKI CT Logs a single point of contact for purposes like rate
limiting and abuse detection, which can make it easier to address any
concerns. However, in the threat model of "Unreliable CA", where CAs
continue to fail to implement CT correctly [2][3], that seems to be missing
the operational lessons. Given the assumption that the model here was
private PKI with private CT logs, then you're likely better off with a
(privately expressed) policy mechanism on the client versus trying to
robustly support OCSP stapling on clients, since the failure mode here
impacts not only CT, but the revocation processing.

[1] https://gist.github.com/sleevi/5efe9ef98961ecfb4da8
[2] https://sslmate.com/blog/post/apples_new_ct_policy
[3]
https://www.hardenize.com/blog/certificate-transparency-policies-diverge-with-apples-update