[Ace] Draft ACE Charter

Hello all,

Welcome to the list!

The purpose of this list is to organize interest in a group to define the charter for work on Authentication and Authorization for Constrained Environments.

Our mailing list can be found at (1), existing work can be found at (2), and draft charter can be found at (3).

We welcome your feedback!

Thanks,

Kind Regards
Kepeng & Stefanie

(1)Mailing List

https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ace

(2)Existing work:

Use Cases:
http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-garcia-core-security
http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-greevenbosch-core-authreq
http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-seitz-core-sec-usecases

Solutions
http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-gerdes-core-dcaf-authorize
http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-kang-core-secure-reconfiguration
http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-selander-core-access-control
http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-zhu-core-groupauth
http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-pporamba-dtls-certkey
http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-schmitt-two-way-authentication-for-iot
http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-seitz-core-security-modes

(3)Draft Charter - Authentication and Authorization for Constrained Environment (ACE)

The CoAP (Constrained Application Protocol) is a light-weight application layer protocol, especially suitable for applications such as smart energy, smart home, building automation, remote patient monitoring etc. Due to the nature of these applications, including a critical, unattended infrastructure and usage in the personal sphere, security and privacy protection are critical components.

Currently, a problem with constrained devices is the realization of such secure communication. The devices only have limited resources such as memory, storage and transmission capacity. These constraints severely limit the security functions and communications the device can perform. Missing functionality includes authentication, which provides trust and ensures an entity is who it says it is, and authorization, which defines and enforces access rights for different clients.

The ACE WG focuses on providing constrained devices with the necessary prerequisites to use REST operations in a secure way. Constrained devices will thus be enabled to authenticate communications from other (constrained or less-constrained) devices, to communicate securely with them and to verify their individual authorization to access specific resources. To achieve this, ACE will be able to employ an architecture with one or more trusted less-constrained devices which will relieve the constrained nodes from complex security related tasks (e.g. managing authorization policies and a large number of keys). ACE will use CoAP and employ security properties of DTLS whenever possible.

The ACE WG has the following tasks:
- Document the use cases and high-level requirements for secured communication between constrained devices.
- Define certificate profiling (what kinds of certificates and which attributes are to be used).
- Define a mechanism for authenticated and protected transfer of authorization information suitable for constrained device to constrained device communication.
- Define an access ticket and authorization information format suitable for constrained devices.
- Define bootstrapping for authorization information using the Resource Directory.