Network Working Group A. Davidson Internet-Draft LIP Lisboa Intended status: Informational M. Finkel Expires: 26 August 2021 The Tor Project M. Thomson Mozilla C.A. Wood Cloudflare 22 February 2021 Key Consistency and Discovery draft-wood-key-consistency-00 Abstract This document describes the key consistency and correctness requirements of protocols such as Privacy Pass, Oblivious DoH, and Oblivious HTTP for user privacy. It discusses several mechanisms and proposals for enabling user privacy in varying threat models. In concludes with discussion of open problems in this area. Discussion Venues This note is to be removed before publishing as an RFC. Discussion of this document takes place on the mailing list (), which is archived at . Source for this draft and an issue tracker can be found at https://github.com/chris-wood/key-consitency. Status of This Memo This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet- Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." This Internet-Draft will expire on 26 August 2021. Davidson, et al. Expires 26 August 2021 [Page 1] Internet-Draft Key Consistency and Discovery February 2021 Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2021 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved. This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/ license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License. Table of Contents 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1.1. Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 3. Core Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 4. Deploying Consistency and Correctness . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 4.1. Server-Provided Key Discovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 4.2. Proxy-Based Key Discovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 4.3. Log-Based Key Discovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 4.4. Anonymous System Key Discovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 4.5. Consensus-based Key Discovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 4.6. Minimum Validity Periods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 5. Future Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 6. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 7. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 7.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 7.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Davidson, et al. Expires 26 August 2021 [Page 2] Internet-Draft Key Consistency and Discovery February 2021 1. Introduction Several proposed privacy-enhancing protocols such as Privacy Pass [PRIVACY-PASS], Oblivious DoH [ODOH], and Oblivious HTTP [OHTTP] require clients to obtain and use a public key for execution. For example, Privacy Pass public keys are used by clients for validating privately issued tokens for anonymous session resumption. Oblivious DoH and HTTP both use public keys to encrypt messages to a particular server. In all cases, a common security goal is that recipients cannot link usage of a public key to a specific (set of) user(s). In other words, all users of a public key should belong to the same anonymity set, and an attacker should not be able to actively reduce the size of this anonymity set. Moreover, an attacker should not be able to convince users to use a key that does not belong to the intended server. In this document, we elaborate on these core requirements, and survey various system designs that might be used to satisfy them. The purpose of this document is to highlight challenges in building and deploying solutions to this problem. 1.1. Requirements The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here. 2. Terminology This document defines the following terms: Key Consistency and Correctness System (KCCS): A mechanism for providing clients with a consistent view of cryptographic key material. Reliant System: A system that embeds one or more key consistency and correctness systems. The KCCS's consistency model is dependent on the implementation and reliant system's threat model. Davidson, et al. Expires 26 August 2021 [Page 3] Internet-Draft Key Consistency and Discovery February 2021 3. Core Requirements Privacy-focused protocols which rely on widely shared public keys typically require keys be consistent and correct. Informally, key consistency is the requirement that all users of a key share the same view of the key. Some protocols depend on large sets of users with consistent keys for privacy reasons. Specifically, all users with a consistent key represent an anonymity set wherein each user of the key in that set is indistinguishable from the rest. An attacker that can actively cause inconsistent views of keys can therefore compromise user privacy. An attacker may separately reduce a user's privacy by forcing them into a smaller anonymity set by using an incorrect key. Informally, a key is correct if it belongs to the intended server and is not otherwise available to an attacker. In a public key setting, this means that the public key is that which is owned by the corresponding owner, and only that owner has access to the private key. An attacker that can actively cause users to make use of incorrect keys may be able to compromise user privacy. Reliant systems must also consider agility when trying to satisfy these requirements. A naive solution to ensuring consistent and correct keys is to only use a single, fixed key pair for the entirety of the system. Users can then embed this key into software or elsewhere as needed, without any additional mechanics or controls to ensure that other users have a different key. However, this solution clearly is not viable in practice. If the corresponding key is compromised, the system fails. Rotation must therefore be supported, and in doing so, users need some mechanism to ensure that newly rotated keys are consistent and correct. Operationally, servers rotating keys may likely need to accommodate distributed system state-synchronization issues without sacrificing availability. Some systems and protocols may choose to prioritize strong consistency over availability, but this document assumes that availability is preferred to consistency. 4. Deploying Consistency and Correctness There are a variety of ways in which reliant systems may build _key consistency and correct systems_ (KCCS), ranging in operational complexity to ease-of-implementation. In this section, we survey a number of possible solutions. The viability of each varies depending on the applicable threat model, external dependencies, and overall reliant system's requirements. We do not include the fixed public key model from Section 3, as this is likely not a viable solution for systems and protocols in practice. In all scenarios, the server corresponding to the desired key is considered malicious. Davidson, et al. Expires 26 August 2021 [Page 4] Internet-Draft Key Consistency and Discovery February 2021 4.1. Server-Provided Key Discovery In this model, users would directly query servers for their corresponding public key. The properties of this solution depend on external mechanisms in place to ensure consistency or correctness. Absent any such mechanisms, servers can produce unique keys for users without detection. External mechanisms to ensure consistency here might include, though are not limited to: * Presenting a signed assertion from a trusted entity that the key is correct. * Presenting proof that the key is present in some tamper-proof log, similar to Certificate Transparency ([RFC6962]) logs. * User communication or gossip ensuring that all users have a shared view of the key. The precise external mechanism used here depends largely on the threat model. If there is a trusted external log for keys, this may be a viable solution. 4.2. Proxy-Based Key Discovery In this model, there exists a proxy that fetches keys from servers on behalf of multiple users. If this proxy is trusted, then all users which request a key from this server are assured they have a consistent view of the server key. However, if this proxy is not trusted, operational risks may arise: * The proxy can collude with the server to give per-user keys to clients. * The proxy can give all users a key owned by the proxy, and either collude with the server to use this key or retroactively use this key to compromise user privacy when users later make use of the key. Mitigating these risks may require tamper-proof logs as in Section 4.1, or via user gossip protocols. Davidson, et al. Expires 26 August 2021 [Page 5] Internet-Draft Key Consistency and Discovery February 2021 4.3. Log-Based Key Discovery In this model, servers publish keys in a tamper-proof log similar to that of Certificate Transparency [RFC6962]. Users may then fetch keys directly from the server and subsequently verify their existence in the log. The log is operated and audited in such a way that the contents of the log are consistent for all users. Any reliant system which depends on this type of KCCS requires the log be audited or users have some other mechanism for checking their view of the log state (gossiping). However, this type of system does not ensure proactive security against malicious servers unless log participants actively check log proofs. This requirement may impede deployment in practice, given that no web browser checks SignedCertificateTimestamps before using (accepting as valid) a corresponding TLS certificate. 4.4. Anonymous System Key Discovery In this model, users leverage an anonymity network such as Tor to fetch keys directly from servers over multiple vantage points. Depending on how clients fetch such keys from servers, it may become more difficult for servers to uniquely target individual users with unique keys without detection. This is especially true as the number of users of these anonymity networks increases. However, beyond Tor, there does not exist a special-purpose anonymity network for this purpose. 4.5. Consensus-based Key Discovery In this model, users query a database containing assertions that bind server names and keys. The assertions provided by this database are created by a coalition of entities that periodically agree on the correct binding of server names and key material. In this model the agreement is achieve via a consensus protocol, but the specific consensus protocol is dependent on the implementation. For privacy, users should either download the entire database and query it locally, or remotely query the database using a private information retrieval (PIR) protocol. In the case where the database is downloaded locally, it should be considered stale and re-fetch periodically, as well. When the entire database is downloaded, this model is appropriate in small scale deployments where the number of bindings in the database is much smaller than the number of users of the reliant system. In a reliant system with a large user base, this model imposes bandwidth costs on each user that may be impractical. In larger scale deployments, the short-comings of this model may be similar to Section 4.3. Davidson, et al. Expires 26 August 2021 [Page 6] Internet-Draft Key Consistency and Discovery February 2021 If the database is small and users query it infrequently, retrieval techniques based on PIR may be viable. 4.6. Minimum Validity Periods In addition to ensuring that there is one key at any time, or a limited number keys, any system needs to ensure that a server cannot rotate its keys too often in order to divide clients into smaller groups based on when keys are acquired. Such considerations are already highlighted within the Privacy Pass ecosystem, more discussion can be found at [PRIVACY-PASS-ARCH]. Setting a minimum validity period limits the ability of a server to rotate keys, but also limits the rate of key rotation. 5. Future Work The model in Section 4.4 seems to be the most lightweight and easy- to-deploy mechanism for ensuring key consistency and correctness. However, it remains unclear if there exists such an anonymity network that can scale to the widespread adoption of and requirements of protocols like Privacy Pass, Oblivious DoH, or Oblivious HTTP. Existing infrastructure based on technologies like Certificate Transparency or Key Transparency may work, but there is currently no general purpose system for transparency of opaque keys (or other application data). 6. Security Considerations This document discusses several models that systems might use to implement public key discovery while ensuring key consistency and correctness. It does not make any recommendations for such models as the best model depends on differing operational requirements and threat models. 7. References 7.1. Normative References [RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997, . [RFC6962] Laurie, B., Langley, A., and E. Kasper, "Certificate Transparency", RFC 6962, DOI 10.17487/RFC6962, June 2013, . Davidson, et al. Expires 26 August 2021 [Page 7] Internet-Draft Key Consistency and Discovery February 2021 [RFC7748] Langley, A., Hamburg, M., and S. Turner, "Elliptic Curves for Security", RFC 7748, DOI 10.17487/RFC7748, January 2016, . [RFC8174] Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC 2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174, May 2017, . 7.2. Informative References [ODOH] Kinnear, E., McManus, P., Pauly, T., and C. Wood, "Oblivious DNS Over HTTPS", Work in Progress, Internet- Draft, draft-pauly-dprive-oblivious-doh-04, 26 January 2021, . [OHTTP] Thomson, M. and C.A. Wood, "Oblivious HTTP", Work in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-ietf-http-oblivious- latest, . [PRIVACY-PASS] Celi, S., Davidson, A., and A. Faz-Hernandez, "Privacy Pass Protocol Specification", Work in Progress, Internet- Draft, draft-ietf-privacypass-protocol-00, 5 January 2021, . [PRIVACY-PASS-ARCH] Davidson, A., "Privacy Pass Architectural Framework", Work in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-ietf-privacypass- architecture-00, 5 January 2021, . Authors' Addresses Alex Davidson LIP Lisboa Email: alex.davidson92@gmail.com Matthew Finkel The Tor Project Email: sysrqb@torproject.org Davidson, et al. Expires 26 August 2021 [Page 8] Internet-Draft Key Consistency and Discovery February 2021 Martin Thomson Mozilla Email: mt@lowentropy.net Christopher A. Wood Cloudflare 101 Townsend St San Francisco, United States of America Email: caw@heapingbits.net Davidson, et al. Expires 26 August 2021 [Page 9]