Phase 1 Report of the MD-Distro Subcommittee

INTRODUCTION

The InCommon metadata signing certificate is signed by a CA whose certificate expires in March 2014. The phase 1 goal of this subcommittee is to determine if a traditional X.509 PKI is required for the foreseeable future. This subcommittee offers the following observations, recommendations and guidance to InCommon's Technical Advisory Committee and InCommon Operations.

The discussions occurred over a series of weekly phone calls with email discussion on the md-distro@incommon.org email list. Members of the InCommon participant community were invited to join the open discussions. Notes and archives are available on the subcommittee's home page.

OBSERVATIONS

In general, a PKI provides flexibility when an end-entity certificate (which in our case is the metadata signing certificate) is re-keyed. Another advantage is that an end-entity certificate can be revoked without much reconfiguration (provided end users are doing revocation correctly). However, reconfiguration headaches will occur when the PKI's root certificate expires or otherwise needs to be replaced.

Furthermore, even in a full-blown PKIX model, the root of a trust path does not have to be a CA. Path validation and trust in the path is what is important. The goal is that the certificate being evaluated is trusted and currently valid. In practice, the only case for real-time certificate validation is software intentionally pulling MD live.

The discussion continued, dividing the analysis into two use cases: is there any value in rooting a metadata (MD) signing key in (1) an online or (2) an offline CA?

It was also noted that relying on Certificate Revocation Lists (CRLs) extends the vulnerability window in relation to a given signed MD aggregate's expiry date.  Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) is also redundant, relying on a third party lookup, which is equivalent to re

CONCLUSION

Although there may be reason to further explore online signing and therefore related security measures of online signing keys (e.g., hardware security modules), the group found no compelling reason for a PKI CA, so long as adequate practice for and documentation of the protection of the signing key is accomplished.

IMPACT

We can't be 100% certain that no one is relying on the CA. However, there is no practical reason or known deployment to make us think this true. What might break?

1. SimpleSAML deployments rely on the fingerprint of the signing cert (rather than the key). So, if we decide to keep the same signing key but wrap it in a self-signed certificate, migration and reconfiguration issues will exist for all SimpleSAML users. This has been the case every time we renewed the signing certificate (every two years), so this represents no significant increase in the rate of reconfiguration (current signing certificate expires 2 May 2014).

2. Non-standard deployments. There are few non-standard deployments that we know of. This may be low risk with exception of, for instance, government agencies relying on CA site minder. We also need to explore the limitations of ADFS.

This raises an opportunity to be more explicit in our documentation on ways we expect participants to do metadata validation. We can remind participants if they are relying on the CA today, they're relying on security patterns that are no longer relevant.

If, in the future, a CA is needed, we can resign the signing certificate at that time, or wrap a PKI around a self-signed certificate. There are known examples of this. For example, eduGAIN uses a self-signed certificate for online metadata signing.

LIFETIME OF THE CURRENT SIGNING KEY

We also discussed the determination of whether the current 2048-bit metadata signing key needs to be replaced. The question is, What would restricting the lifetime of the key prevent? Two vectors of attack were postulated. First, there might be an attack which relies on having large amounts of cypher text available. The more you generate, the more vulnerable you are. However, there are no known attacks of this nature for RSA 2048-bit keys, and the amount of known cypher text is minuscule (at most 5 signings per week for XX years for the current key). Where XX InCommon operations will provide. Second, an attack might exist that relies on sheer computational power. Someone may have theoretically been applying resources over the XX year period to the public key to compute the value of the private key?? We have found no evidence to suggest that this is practical even with today's technology. We conclude that there is currently no reasoned terminus for a 2048-bit key's lifetime. There are practical reasons to limit its life to the year 2038 for other known reasons <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem>.

RECOMMENDATIONS

1. Create a new policy document to replace the CP/CPS that describes security practices for the protection of the signing key
2. Re-sign the same signing key with a self-signed certificate and do away with the remnants of the old InCommon self-rooted CA. This will reduce confusion. No recommendation for cert lifetime is offered, other than to suggest no longer than 2038.
3. SimpleSAML.php will have a problem due to a change in the fingerprint as output of entire cert. We will contact the SS developers as well as communicate the migration plan clearly with participants.
4. Communicate with any known users of non-standard implementations. Of note: particularly NSF, NIH, and a call to any using ADFS for known configuration dependencies.
5. Expired Certificates issued by the old InCommon CA still exist in participant MD. We recommend communicating about these old certificates but separately, after the communication about the transition with the signing key's root cert and CA.