Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) N. Williams Request for Comments: 6680 Cryptonector, LLC Category: Standards Track L. Johansson ISSN: 2070-1721 SUNET S. Hartman Painless Security S. Josefsson SJD AB August 2012
Generic Security Service Application Programming Interface (GSS-API) Naming Extensions
Abstract
The Generic Security Service Application Programming Interface (GSS-API) provides a simple naming architecture that supports name- based authorization. This document introduces new APIs that extend the GSS-API naming model to support name attribute transfer between GSS-API peers.
Status of This Memo
This is an Internet Standards Track document.
This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It represents the consensus of the IETF community. It has received public review and has been approved for publication by the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). Further information on Internet Standards is available in Section 2 of RFC 5741.
Information about the current status of this document, any errata, and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6680.
Copyright Notice
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the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License.
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As described in [RFC4768], the GSS-API's naming architecture suffers from certain limitations. This document attempts to overcome these limitations.
A number of extensions to the GSS-API [RFC2743] and its C-bindings [RFC2744] are described herein. The goal is to make information modeled as "name attributes" available to applications. Such information MAY, for instance, be used by applications to make authorization decisions. For example, Kerberos V authorization data elements, both in their raw forms as well as mapped to more useful value types, can be made available to GSS-API applications through these interfaces.
The model is that GSS names have attributes. The attributes of a name may be authenticated (e.g., an X509 attribute certificate or signed Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) attribute assertion) or may have been set on a GSS name for the purpose of locally "asserting" the attribute during credential acquisition or security context exchange. Name attributes' values are network representations thereof (e.g., the actual value octets of the contents of an X.509 certificate extension, for example) and are intended to be useful for constructing portable access control facilities. Applications may often require language- or platform- specific data types, rather than network representations of name attributes, so a function is provided to obtain objects of such types associated with names and name attributes.
Future updates of this specification may involve adding an attribute namespace for attributes that only have application-specific semantics. Note that mechanisms will still need to know how to transport such attributes. The IETF may also wish to add functions by which to inquire whether a mechanism(s) understands a given attribute name or namespace and to list which attributes or attribute namespaces a mechanism understands. Finally, the IETF may want to consider adding a function by which to determine the name of the issuer of a name attribute.
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].
An attribute is "authenticated" if and only if there is a secure association between the attribute (and its values) and the trusted source of the peer credential. Examples of authenticated attributes are (any part of) the signed portion of an X.509 certificate or AD-KDCIssued authorization data elements (Section 5.2.6.2 of [RFC4120]) in Kerberos V Tickets, provided, of course, that the authenticity of the respective security associations (e.g., signatures) has been verified.
Note that the fact that an attribute is authenticated does not imply anything about the semantics of the attribute nor that the trusted credential source was authorized to assert the attribute. Such interpretations SHOULD be the result of applying local policy to the attribute.
An unauthenticated attribute is called _asserted_ in what follows. This is not to be confused with other uses of the words "asserted" or "assertion" such as "SAML attribute assertion", the attributes of which may be authenticated in the sense of this document, for instance, if the SAML attribute assertion was signed by a key trusted by the peer.
To facilitate the development of portable applications that make use of name attributes to construct and evaluate portable Access Control Lists (ACLs), the GSS-API makes name attribute values available in canonical network encodings thereof.
Several factors influence the context in which a name attribute is interpreted. One is the trust context.
As discussed previously, applications apply local policy to determine whether a particular peer credential issuer is trusted to make a given statement. Different GSS-API mechanisms and deployments have different trust models surrounding attributes they provide about a name.
For example, Kerberos deployments in the enterprise typically trust a Key Distribution Center (KDC) to make any statement about principals in a realm. This includes attributes such as group membership.
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In contrast, in a federated SAML environment, the identity provider typically exists in a different organization than the acceptor. In this case, the set of group memberships or entitlements that the IDP is permitted to make needs to be filtered by the policy of the acceptor and federation.
So even an attribute containing the same information, such as email address, would need to be treated differently by the application in the context of an enterprise deployment from the context of a federation.
Another aspect related to trust is the role of the credential issuer in providing the attribute. Consider Public Key Cryptography for Initial Authentication in Kerberos (PKINIT) [RFC4556]. In this protocol, a public key and associated certificate are used to authenticate to a Kerberos KDC. Consider how attributes related to a PKINIT certificate should be made available in GSS-API authentications based on the Kerberos ticket. In some deployments, the certificate may be fully trusted; by including the certificate information in the ticket, the KDC permits the acceptor to trust the information in the certificate just as if the KDC itself had made these statements. In other deployments, the KDC may have authorized a hash of the certificate without evaluating the content of the certificate or generally trusting the issuing certification authority. In this case, if the certificate were included in the issued ticket, the KDC would only be making the statement that the certificate was used in the authentication. This statement would be authenticated but would not imply that the KDC asserted that particular attributes of the certificate accurately described the initiator.
Another aspect of context is encoding of the attribute information. An attribute containing an ASCII [ANSI.X3-4.1986] or UTF-8 [RFC3629] version of an email address could not be interpreted the same as an ASN.1 Distinguished Encoding Rules email address in a certificate.
All of these contextual aspects of a name attribute affect whether two attributes can be treated the same by an application and thus whether they should be considered the same name attribute. In the GSS-API naming extensions, attributes that have different contexts MUST have different names so they can be distinguished by applications. As an unfortunate consequence of this requirement, multiple attribute names will exist for the same basic information. That is, there is no single attribute name for the email address of an initiator. Other aspects of how mechanisms describe information about subjects would already make this true. For example, some mechanisms use OIDs to name attributes; others use URIs.
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Local implementations or platforms are likely to have sufficient policy and information to know when contexts can be treated as the same. For example, the GSS-API implementation may know that a particular certification authority can be trusted in the context of a PKINIT authentication. The local implementation may have sufficient policy to know that a particular credential issuer is trusted to make a given statement. In order to take advantage of this local knowledge within the GSS-API implementation, naming extensions support the concept of local attributes in addition to standard attributes. For example, an implementation might provide a local attribute for email address. The implementation would specify the encoding and representation of this attribute; mechanism-specific standards attributes would be re-encoded if necessary to meet this representation. Only email addresses in contexts that meet the requirements of local policy would be mapped into this local attribute.
Such local attributes inherently expose a trade-off between interoperability and usability. Using a local attribute in an application requires knowledge of the local implementation. However, using a standardized attribute in an application requires more knowledge of policy and more validation logic in the application. Sharing this logic in the local platform provides more consistency across applications as well as reduces implementation costs. Both options are needed.
Different underlying mechanisms (e.g., SAML or X.509 certificates) provide different representations for the names of their attributes. In X.509 certificates, most objects are named by object identifiers (OIDs). The type of object (certificate extension, name constraint, keyPurposeID, etc.) along with the OID is sufficient to identify the attribute. By contrast, according to Sections 8.2 and 2.7.3.1 of [OASIS.saml-core-2.0-os], the name of an attribute has two parts. The first is a URI describing the format of the name. The second part, whose form depends on the format URI, is the actual name. In other cases, an attribute might represent a certificate that plays some particular role in a GSS-API mechanism; such attributes might have a simple mechanism-defined name.
Attribute names MUST support multiple components. If there is more than one component in an attribute name, the more significant components define the semantics of the less significant components.
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Attribute names are represented as OCTET STRING elements in the API described below. These attribute names have syntax and semantics that are understood by the application and by the lower-layer implementations (some of which are described below).
If an attribute name contains a space (ASCII 0x20), the first space separates the most significant or primary component of the name from the remainder. We may refer to the primary component of the attribute name as the attribute name's "prefix". If there is no space, the primary component is the entire name; otherwise, it defines the interpretation of the remainder of the names.
If the primary component contains a ":" (ASCII 0x3a), then the primary component is a URI. Otherwise, the attribute is a local attribute and the primary component has meaning to the implementation of GSS-API or to the specific configuration of the application. Local attribute names with an "at" sign ("@") in them are reserved for future allocation by the IETF.
Since attribute names are split at the first space into prefix and suffix, there is a potential for ambiguity if a mechanism blindly passes through a name attribute whose name it does not understand. In order to prevent such ambiguities, the mechanism MUST always prefix raw name attributes with a prefix that reflects the context of the attribute.
Local attribute names under the control of an administrator or a sufficiently trusted part of the platform need not have a prefix to describe context.
The construct "SET OF OCTET STRING" occurs once in RFC 2743 [RFC2743], where it is used to represent a set of status strings in the GSS_Display_status call. The Global Grid Forum has defined SET OF OCTET STRING as a buffer set type in GFD.024 [GFD.024], which also provides one API for memory management of these structures. The normative reference to GFD.024 [GFD.024] is for the buffer set functions defined in Section 2.5 and the associated buffer set C types defined in Section 6 (namely gss_buffer_set_desc, gss_buffer_set_t, gss_create_empty_buffer_set, gss_add_buffer_set_member, gss_release_buffer_set). Nothing else from GFD.024 is required to implement this document. In particular, that document specifies changes to the behavior of existing GSS-API
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functions in Section 3: implementing those changes are not required to implement this document. Any implementation of SET OF OCTET STRING for use by this specification MUST preserve order.
The C-bindings for the new APIs use some types from [RFC5587] to avoid issues with the use of "const". The normative reference to [RFC5587] is for the C types specified in Figure 1 of Section 3.4.6. Nothing else from that document is required to implement this document.
o display_name OCTET STRING -- caller must release with GSS_Release_buffer()
Return major_status codes:
o GSS_S_COMPLETE indicates no error.
o GSS_S_UNAVAILABLE indicates that the given name could not be displayed using the syntax of the given name type.
o GSS_S_FAILURE indicates a general error.
This function displays a given name using the given name syntax, if possible. This operation may require mapping Mechanism Names (MNs) to generic name syntaxes or generic name syntaxes to mechanism- specific name syntaxes. Such mappings may not always be feasible and MAY be inexact or lossy; therefore, this function may fail.
o attrs SET OF OCTET STRING -- the caller is responsible for de- allocating memory using GSS_Release_buffer_set
Return major_status codes:
o GSS_S_COMPLETE indicates no error.
o GSS_S_FAILURE indicates a general error.
This function outputs the set of attributes of a name. It also indicates if a given name is an Mechanism Name (MN) or not and, if it is, the mechanism of which it's an MN.
The gss_buffer_set_t is used here as the C representation of SET OF OCTET STRING. This type is used to represent a set of attributes and is a NULL-terminated array of gss_buffer_t. The gss_buffer_set_t type and associated API is defined in GFD.024 [GFD.024]. The "attrs" buffer set is de-allocated by the caller using gss_release_buffer_set().
o authenticated BOOLEAN -- TRUE if and only if authenticated by the trusted peer credential source
o complete BOOLEAN -- TRUE if and only if this represents a complete set of values for the name
o values SET OF OCTET STRING -- the caller is responsible for de- allocating memory using GSS_Release_buffer_set
o display_values SET OF OCTET STRING -- the caller is responsible for de-allocating memory using GSS_Release_buffer_set
Return major_status codes:
o GSS_S_COMPLETE indicates no error.
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o GSS_S_UNAVAILABLE indicates that the given attribute OID is not known or set.
o GSS_S_FAILURE indicates a general error.
This function outputs the value(s) associated with a given GSS name object for a given name attribute.
The complete flag denotes that (if TRUE) the set of values represents a complete set of values for this name. The peer being an authoritative source of information for this attribute is a sufficient condition for the complete flag to be set by the peer.
In the federated case, when several peers may hold some of the attributes about a name, this flag may be highly dangerous and SHOULD NOT be used.
NOTE: This function relies on the GSS-API notion of "SET OF" allowing for order preservation; this has been discussed on the KITTEN WG mailing list, and the consensus seems to be that, indeed, that was always the intention. It should be noted, however, that the order presented does not always reflect an underlying order of the mechanism-specific source of the attribute values.
The C-bindings of GSS_Get_name_attribute() require one function call per attribute value for multi-valued name attributes. This is done by using a single gss_buffer_t for each value and an input/output integer parameter to distinguish initial and subsequent calls and to indicate when all values have been obtained.
The "more" input/output parameter should point to an integer variable whose value, on first call to gss_get_name_attribute(), MUST be -1 and whose value upon function call return will be non-zero to indicate that additional values remain or zero to indicate that no values remain. The caller should not modify this parameter after the initial call. The status of the complete and authenticated flags MUST NOT change between multiple calls to iterate over values for an attribute.
The output buffers "value" and "display_value" are de-allocated by the caller using gss_release_buffer().
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OM_uint32 gss_get_name_attribute( OM_uint32 *minor_status, gss_const_name_t name, gss_const_buffer_t attr, int *authenticated, int *complete, gss_buffer_t value, gss_buffer_t display_value, int *more );
o complete BOOLEAN -- TRUE if and only if this represents a complete set of values for the name
o attr OCTET STRING
o values SET OF OCTET STRING
Outputs:
o major_status INTEGER
o minor_status INTEGER
Return major_status codes:
o GSS_S_COMPLETE indicates no error.
o GSS_S_UNAVAILABLE indicates that the given attribute NAME is not known or could not be set.
o GSS_S_FAILURE indicates a general error.
When the given NAME object is an MN, this function MUST fail (with GSS_S_FAILURE) if the mechanism for which the name is an MN does not recognize the attribute name or the namespace it belongs to. This is because name attributes generally have some semantics that mechanisms must understand.
On the other hand, when the given name is not an MN, this function MAY succeed even if none of the available mechanisms understand the given attribute, in which subsequent credential acquisition attempts
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(via GSS_Acquire_cred() or GSS_Add_cred()) with the resulting name MUST fail for mechanisms that do not understand any one or more name attributes set with this function. Applications may wish to use a non-MN, then acquire a credential with that name as the desired name. The acquired credentials will have elements only for the mechanisms that can carry the name attributes set on the name.
Note that this means that all name attributes are locally critical: the mechanism(s) must understand them. The reason for this is that name attributes must necessarily have some meaning that the mechanism must understand, even in the case of application-specific attributes (in which case the mechanism must know to transport the attribute to any peer). However, there is no provision to ensure that peers understand any given name attribute. Individual name attributes may be critical with respect to peers, and the specification of the attribute will have to indicate whether the mechanism's protocol or the application is expected to enforce criticality.
The complete flag denotes that (if TRUE) the set of values represents a complete set of values for this name. The peer being an authoritative source of information for this attribute is a sufficient condition for the complete flag to be set by the peer.
In the federated case, when several peers may hold some of the attributes about a name, this flag may be highly dangerous and SHOULD NOT be used.
NOTE: This function relies on the GSS-API notion of "SET OF" allowing for order preservation; this has been discussed on the KITTEN WG mailing list, and the consensus seems to be that, indeed, that was always the intention. It should be noted that underlying mechanisms may not respect the given order.
The C-bindings of GSS_Set_name_attribute() requires one function call per attribute value for multi-valued name attributes. Each call adds one value. To replace an attribute's every value, delete the attribute's values first with GSS_Delete_name_attribute().
OM_uint32 gss_set_name_attribute( OM_uint32 *minor_status, gss_const_name_t name, int complete, gss_const_buffer_t attr, gss_const_buffer_t value );
o exp_composite_name OCTET STRING -- the caller is responsible for de-allocating memory using GSS_Release_buffer
Return major_status codes:
o GSS_S_COMPLETE indicates no error.
o GSS_S_FAILURE indicates a general error.
This function outputs a token that can be imported with GSS_Import_name(), using GSS_C_NT_COMPOSITE_EXPORT as the name type and that preserves any name attribute information (including the authenticated/complete flags) associated with the input name (which GSS_Export_name() may well not). The token format is not specified here as this facility is intended for inter-process communication only; however, all such tokens MUST start with a two-octet token ID, hex 04 02, in network byte order.
The OID for GSS_C_NT_COMPOSITE_EXPORT is 1.3.6.1.5.6.6.
This document creates a namespace of GSS-API name attributes. Attributes are named by URIs, so no single authority is technically needed for allocation. However, future deployment experience may indicate the need for an IANA registry for URIs used to reference names specified by IETF standards. It is expected that this will be a registry of URNs, but this document provides no further guidance on this registry.
This document extends the GSS-API naming model to include support for name attributes. The intention is that name attributes are to be used as a basis for (among other things) authorization decisions or personalization for applications relying on GSS-API security contexts.
The security of the application may be critically dependent on the security of the attributes. This document classifies attributes as asserted or authenticated. Asserted (non-authenticated) attributes MUST NOT be used if the attribute has security implications for the application (e.g., authorization decisions) since asserted attributes may easily be controlled by the peer directly.
It is important to understand the meaning of "authenticated" in this setting. Authenticated does not imply that any semantic of the attribute is claimed to be true. The only implication is that a trusted third party has asserted the attribute as opposed to the attribute being asserted by the peer itself. Any additional semantics are always the result of applying policy. For instance, in a given deployment, the mail attribute of the subject may be authenticated and sourced from an email system where "authoritative" values are kept. In another situation, users may be allowed to modify their mail addresses freely. In both cases, the "mail" attribute may be authenticated by virtue of being included in signed SAML attribute assertions or by other means authenticated by the underlying mechanism.
When the underlying security mechanism does not provide a permanent unique identity (e.g., anonymous Kerberos), GSS-API naming extensions may be used to provide a permanent unique identity attribute. This may be a globally unique identifier, a value unique within the namespace of the attribute issuer, or a "directed" identifier that is unique per peer acceptor identity. SAML, to use one example technology, offers a number of built-in constructs for this purpose, such as a <NameID> with a Format of "urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:nameid-format:persistent". SAML deployments also typically make use of domain-specific attribute types that can serve as identifiers.
[GFD.024] Meder, S., Welch, V., Tuecke, S., and D. Engert, "GSS-API Extensions", Global Grid Forum GFD.024, June 2004, <http://www.ggf.org/documents/GFD.24.pdf>.
[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.
[RFC2743] Linn, J., "Generic Security Service Application Program Interface Version 2, Update 1", RFC 2743, January 2000.
[RFC2744] Wray, J., "Generic Security Service API Version 2 : C-bindings", RFC 2744, January 2000.
[RFC5587] Williams, N., "Extended Generic Security Service Mechanism Inquiry APIs", RFC 5587, July 2009.
[ANSI.X3-4.1986] American National Standards Institute, "Coded Character Set - 7-bit American Standard Code for Information Interchange", ANSI X3.4, 1986.
[OASIS.saml-core-2.0-os] Cantor, S., Kemp, J., Philpott, R., and E. Maler, "Assertions and Protocol for the OASIS Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) V2.0", OASIS Standard saml-core- 2.0-os, March 2005.
[RFC3629] Yergeau, F., "UTF-8, a transformation format of ISO 10646", STD 63, RFC 3629, November 2003.
[RFC4120] Neuman, C., Yu, T., Hartman, S., and K. Raeburn, "The Kerberos Network Authentication Service (V5)", RFC 4120, July 2005.
[RFC4556] Zhu, L. and B. Tung, "Public Key Cryptography for Initial Authentication in Kerberos (PKINIT)", RFC 4556, June 2006.
[RFC4768] Hartman, S., "Desired Enhancements to Generic Security Services Application Program Interface (GSS-API) Version 3 Naming", RFC 4768, December 2006.
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Authors' Addresses
Nicolas Williams Cryptonector, LLC
EMail: nico@cryptonector.com
Leif Johansson Swedish University Network Thulegatan 11 Stockholm Sweden