[TLS] Appendix B. Additional Use Cases for FXA-TLS: draft-santesson-tls-gssapi-03.txt
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[TLS] Appendix B. Additional Use Cases for FXA-TLS: draft-santesson-tls-gssapi-03.txt
Pasi requested more use cases that are not HTTP and he asked why RFC4559
is not sufficient.
In response, appendix B is added. Please see if this satisfies the
requirements.
I would like thank Ryan for helping with the use cases.
http://www.secure-endpoints.com/tls-gss/draft-santesson-tls-gssapi-03.tx
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Appendix B. Additional Use Cases for FXA-TLS
TLS runs on layers beneath a wide range of application protocols such
as LDAP [RFC4510], SMTP [RFC2487], and XMPP [RFC3920] and above a
reliable transport protocol. TLS can add security to any protocol
that uses reliable connections (such as TCP). TLS is also
increasingly being used as the standard method for protecting SIP
[RFC3261] application signaling. TLS can be used to provide
authentication and encryption of the SIP signaling associated with
VOIP (Voice over IP) and other SIP-based applications.
Today these applications use public key certificates to verify the
identity of endpoints.
However, how to manage the issuance level of certificates when
deploying PKI is overwhelmingly complex and such complexity has
gradually eroded the confidence for the PKI-based systems in general.
In addition, the perceived overhead of deploying and managing
certificates is high. As a consequence, the industry badly needs the
ability to secure TLS connections by leveraging the existing
credential infrastructure. For many customers that means Kerberos.
It is highly desirable to enable PKI-less deployments yet still offer
strong authentication.
Having Kerberos/GSS-API in the layer above TLS means all TLS
applications need to be changed in the protocol level. In many
cases, such changes are not technically feasible. For example,
[RFC4559] provides integration with Kerberos in the HTTP level. It
suffers from a couple of drawbacks, most notably it only supports
single-round-trip GSS-API mechanisms and it lacks of channel bindings
to the underlying TLS connection which makes in unsuitable for
deployment in situations where proxies exists. Furthermore,
[RFC4559] lacks of session-based re-authentication (comparing with
TLS). The root causes of these problems are inherent to the HTTP
protocol and can't be fixed trivially.
Consequently, It is a better solution to integrate Kerberos/GSS-API
in the TLS layer. Such integration allows the existing
infrastructure work seamlessly with TLS for the products based on
them in ways that were not practical to do before. For instance, an
increasing number of client and server products support TLS natively,
but many still lack support. As an alternative, users may wish to
use standalone TLS products that rely on being able to obtain a TLS
connection immediately, by simply connecting to a separate port
reserved for the purpose. For example, by default the TCP port for
HTTPS is 443, to distinguish it from HTTP on port 80. TLS can also
be used to tunnel an entire network stack to create a VPN, as is the
case with OpenVPN. Many vendors now marry TLS's encryption and
authentication capabilities with authorization. There has also been
substantial development since the late 1990s in creating client
technology outside of the browser to enable support for client/server
applications. When compared against traditional IPSec VPN
technologies, TLS has some inherent advantages in firewall and NAT
traversal that make it easier to administer for large remote-access
populations.
PSK-TLS as defined in [RFC4279] is a good start but this document
finishes the job by making it more deployable. FKA-TLS also fixes
the mutual-authentication problem in [RFC4279] in the cases where the
PSK can be shared among services on the same host.
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