Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) A. Jain Request for Comments: 8129 Georgia Tech Updates: 4120 N. Kinder Category: Standards Track N. McCallum ISSN: 2070-1721 Red Hat, Inc. March 2017
Authentication Indicator in Kerberos Tickets
Abstract
This document updates RFC 4120, as it specifies an extension in the Kerberos protocol. It defines a new authorization data type, AD-AUTHENTICATION-INDICATOR. The purpose of introducing this data type is to include an indicator of the strength of a client's authentication in service tickets so that application services can use it as an input into policy decisions.
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 7841.
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/rfc8129.
Copyright Notice
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Kerberos [RFC4120] allows secure interaction among users and services over a network. It supports a variety of authentication mechanisms using its pre-authentication framework [RFC6113]. The Kerberos authentication service has been architected to support password-based authentication as well as multi-factor authentication using one-time password devices, public-key cryptography, and other pre-authentication schemes. Implementations that offer pre-authentication mechanisms supporting significantly different strengths of client authentication may choose to keep track of the strength of the authentication that was used, for use as an input into policy decisions.
This document specifies a new authorization data type to convey authentication strength information to application services. Elements of this type appear within an AD-CAMMAC (Authorization Data type Container Authenticated by Multiple Message Authentication Codes) [RFC7751] container.
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 RFC 2119 [RFC2119].
The Key Distribution Center (KDC) MAY include authorization data of ad-type 97, wrapped in AD-CAMMAC, in initial credentials. The KDC MAY copy it from a ticket-granting ticket into service tickets.
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RFC 8129 Authentication Indicator March 2017
The corresponding ad-data field contains the DER encoding [X.690] of the following ASN.1 [X.680] type:
AD-AUTHENTICATION-INDICATOR ::= SEQUENCE OF UTF8String
Each UTF8String value is a short string that indicates that a particular set of requirements was met during the initial authentication. These strings are intended to be compared against known values. They are not intended to store structured data. Each string MUST be either:
o A URI that references a Level of Assurance Profile [RFC6711], or
o A site-defined string, which MUST NOT contain a colon, whose meaning is determined by the realm administrator.
Authorization data elements of type AD-AUTHENTICATION-INDICATOR MUST be included in an AD-CAMMAC container so that their contents can be verified as originating from the KDC. Elements of type AD-AUTHENTICATION-INDICATOR MAY safely be ignored by applications and KDCs that do not implement this element.
Elements of type AD-AUTHENTICATION-INDICATOR are wrapped in AD-CAMMAC containers. AD-CAMMAC supersedes AD-KDC-ISSUED and allows both application services and the KDC to verify the authenticity of the contained authorization data.
KDC implementations MUST use AD-CAMMAC verifiers as described in the security considerations of RFC 7751 [RFC7751] to ensure that AD-AUTHENTICATION-INDICATOR elements are not modified by an attacker. Application servers MUST validate the AD-CAMMAC container before making authorization decisions based on AD-AUTHENTICATION-INDICATOR elements. Application servers MUST NOT make authorization decisions based on AD-AUTHENTICATION-INDICATOR elements that appear outside of AD-CAMMAC containers.
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RFC 8129 Authentication Indicator March 2017
Using multiple strings in AD-AUTHENTICATION-INDICATOR may lead to ambiguity when a service tries to make a decision based on the AD-AUTHENTICATION-INDICATOR values. This ambiguity can be avoided if indicator values are always used as a positive indication of certain requirements being met during the initial authentication. For example, if a "without-password" indicator is inserted whenever authentication occurs without a password, a service might assume this is an indication that a higher-strength client authentication occurred. However, this indicator might also be inserted when no authentication occurred at all (such as anonymous PKINIT).
Application service evaluation of site-defined indicators MUST consider the realm of original authentication in order to avoid cross-realm indicator collisions. Failure to enforce this property can result in invalid authorization decisions.
[X.680] ITU-T, "Information technology -- Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1): Specification of basic notation", ITU-T Recommendation X.680, ISO/IEC International Standard 8824-1:2008, November 2008.
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RFC 8129 Authentication Indicator March 2017
[X.690] ITU-T, "Information technology -- ASN.1 encoding rules: Specification of Basic Encoding Rules (BER), Canonical Encoding Rules (CER) and Distinguished Encoding Rules (DER)", ITU-T Recommendation X.690, ISO/IEC International Standard 8825-1:2008, November 2008.