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2 Network Working Group P. Saint-Andre
3 Internet-Draft &yet
4 Updates: 6120 (if approved) T. Alkemade
5 Intended status: Standards Track
6 Expires: July 27, 2015 January 23, 2015
8 Use of Transport Layer Security (TLS) in the Extensible Messaging and
9 Presence Protocol (XMPP)
10 draft-ietf-uta-xmpp-05
12 Abstract
14 This document provides recommendations for the use of Transport Layer
15 Security (TLS) in the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol
16 (XMPP). This document updates RFC 6120.
18 Status of This Memo
20 This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
21 provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
23 Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
24 Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute
25 working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-
26 Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
28 Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
29 and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
30 time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
31 material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
33 This Internet-Draft will expire on July 27, 2015.
35 Copyright Notice
37 Copyright (c) 2015 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
38 document authors. All rights reserved.
40 This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
41 Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
42 (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
43 publication of this document. Please review these documents
44 carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
45 to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must
46 include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
47 the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
48 described in the Simplified BSD License.
50 Table of Contents
52 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
53 2. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
54 3. Recommendations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
55 3.1. Support for TLS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
56 3.2. Compression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
57 3.3. Session Resumption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
58 3.4. Authenticated Connections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
59 3.5. Unauthenticated Connections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
60 3.6. Server Name Indication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
61 3.7. Human Factors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
62 4. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
63 5. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
64 6. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
65 6.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
66 6.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
67 Appendix A. Implementation Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
68 Appendix B. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
69 Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
71 1. Introduction
73 The Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) [RFC6120]
74 (along with its precursor, the so-called "Jabber protocol") has used
75 Transport Layer Security (TLS) [RFC5246] (along with its precursor,
76 Secure Sockets Layer or SSL) since 1999. Both [RFC6120] and its
77 predecessor [RFC3920] provided recommendations regarding the use of
78 TLS in XMPP. In order to address the evolving threat model on the
79 Internet today, this document provides stronger recommendations.
81 NOTE: Unless explicitly noted otherwise, all of the
82 recommendations specified in [I-D.ietf-uta-tls-bcp] apply to XMPP.
83 In the main, this document merely provides supplementary
84 information; those who implement and deploy XMPP technologies are
85 expected to follow the recommendations of [I-D.ietf-uta-tls-bcp].
87 This document updates [RFC6120].
89 2. Terminology
91 Various security-related terms are to be understood in the sense
92 defined in [RFC4949].
94 The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
95 "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and
96 "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in
97 [RFC2119].
99 3. Recommendations
101 3.1. Support for TLS
103 Support for TLS (specifically, the XMPP profile of STARTTLS) is
104 mandatory for XMPP implementations, as already specified in [RFC6120]
105 and its predecessor [RFC3920].
107 The server (i.e., the XMPP receiving entity) to which a client or
108 peer server (i.e., the XMPP initiating entity) connects might not
109 offer a stream feature of . Although in general this stream feature indicates that
111 the server supports XMPP 1.0 and therefore supports TLS, it is
112 possible that this stream feature might be stripped out by an
113 attacker (see Section 2.1 of [I-D.ietf-uta-tls-attacks]). Therefore,
114 the initiating entity SHOULD proceed with the stream negotiation even
115 if the receiving entity does not advertise support for TLS.
116 Similarly, although a receiving entity SHOULD include the
117 child element to indicate that negotiation of TLS is mandatory, an
118 initiating entity MUST NOT depend on receiving the flag
119 in determining whether TLS will be enforced for the stream.
121 3.2. Compression
123 XMPP supports an application-layer compression technology [XEP-0138].
124 Although this XMPP extension might have slightly stronger security
125 properties than TLS-layer compression (since it is enabled after SASL
126 authentication, as described in [XEP-0170]), this document neither
127 encourages nor discourages use of XMPP-layer compression.
129 3.3. Session Resumption
131 In XMPP, TLS session resumption can be used in concert with the XMPP
132 Stream Management extension; see [XEP-0198] for further details.
134 3.4. Authenticated Connections
136 Both the core XMPP specification [RFC6120] and the "CertID"
137 specification [RFC6125] provide recommendations and requirements for
138 certificate validation in the context of authenticated connections.
139 This document does not supersede those specifications. Wherever
140 possible, it is best to prefer authenticated connections (along with
141 SASL [RFC4422]), as already stated in the core XMPP specification
142 [RFC6120]. In particular, clients MUST authenticate servers and
143 servers MUST authenticate clients. This document does not mandate
144 that servers need to authenticate peer servers (see next section).
146 This document does not modify the recommendations in [RFC6120]
147 regarding the Subject Alternative Names (or other certificate
148 details) that need to be supported for authentication of XMPP
149 connections using PKIX certificates.
151 The Domain Name Associations (DNA) specification [I-D.ietf-xmpp-dna]
152 describes a framework for XMPP server authentication methods, which
153 include not only PKIX but also DNS-Based Authentication of Named
154 Entities (DANE) as defined in [I-D.ietf-dane-srv] and PKIX over
155 Secure HTTP (POSH) as defined in [I-D.ietf-xmpp-posh].
157 3.5. Unauthenticated Connections
159 Given the pervasiveness of passive eavesdropping, even an
160 unauthenticated connection might be better than an unencrypted
161 connection (this is similar to the "better than nothing security"
162 approach for IPsec [RFC5386]). Unauthenticated connections include
163 connections negotiated using anonymous Diffie-Hellman algorithms or
164 using self-signed certificates, among other scenarios. In
165 particular, because of current deployment challenges for
166 authenticated connections between XMPP servers (see
167 [I-D.ietf-xmpp-dna] and [I-D.ietf-xmpp-posh] for details), it can be
168 reasonable for XMPP server implementations to accept unauthenticated
169 connections when Server Dialback keys [XEP-0220] are used; although
170 such keys on their own provide only weak identity verification (made
171 stronger through the use of DNSSEC [RFC4033]), this at least enables
172 encryption of server-to-server connections.
174 3.6. Server Name Indication
176 Although there is no harm in supporting the TLS Server Name
177 Indication (SNI) extension [RFC6066], this is not necessary since the
178 same function is served in XMPP by the 'to' address of the initial
179 stream header as explained in Section 4.7.2 of [RFC6120].
181 3.7. Human Factors
183 It is strongly encouraged that XMPP clients provide ways for end
184 users (and that XMPP servers provide ways for administrators) to
185 complete the following tasks:
187 o Determine if a client-to-server or server-to-server connection is
188 encrypted and authenticated.
190 o Determine the version of TLS used for a client-to-server or
191 server-to-server connection.
193 o Inspect the certificate offered by an XMPP server.
195 o Determine the cipher suite used to encrypt a connection.
197 o Be warned if the certificate changes for a given server.
199 4. IANA Considerations
201 This document requests no actions of the IANA.
203 5. Security Considerations
205 The use of TLS can help limit the information available for
206 correlation to the network and transport layer headers as opposed to
207 the application layer. As typically deployed, XMPP technologies do
208 not leave application-layer routing data (such as XMPP 'to' and
209 'from' addresses) at rest on intermediate systems, since there is
210 only one hop between any two given XMPP servers. As a result,
211 encrypting all hops (sender's client to sender's server, sender's
212 server to recipient's server, recipient's server to recipient's
213 client) can help to limit the amount of "metadata" that might leak.
215 It is possible that XMPP servers themselves might be compromised. In
216 that case, per-hop encryption would not protect XMPP communications,
217 and even end-to-end encryption of (parts of) XMPP stanza payloads
218 would leave addressing information and XMPP roster data in the clear.
219 By the same token, it is possible that XMPP clients (or the end-user
220 devices on which such clients are installed) could also be
221 compromised, leaving users utterly at the mercy of an adversary.
223 This document and related actions to strengthen the security of the
224 XMPP network are based on the assumption that XMPP servers and
225 clients have not been subject to widespread compromise. If this
226 assumption is valid, then ubiquitous use of per-hop TLS channel
227 encryption and more significant deployment of end-to-end object
228 encryption technologies will serve to protect XMPP communications to
229 a measurable degree, compared to the alternatives.
231 6. References
233 6.1. Normative References
235 [I-D.ietf-uta-tls-bcp]
236 Sheffer, Y., Holz, R., and P. Saint-Andre,
237 "Recommendations for Secure Use of TLS and DTLS", draft-
238 ietf-uta-tls-bcp-08 (work in progress), December 2014.
240 [RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
241 Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.
243 [RFC4949] Shirey, R., "Internet Security Glossary, Version 2", RFC
244 4949, August 2007.
246 [RFC5246] Dierks, T. and E. Rescorla, "The Transport Layer Security
247 (TLS) Protocol Version 1.2", RFC 5246, August 2008.
249 [RFC6120] Saint-Andre, P., "Extensible Messaging and Presence
250 Protocol (XMPP): Core", RFC 6120, March 2011.
252 [RFC6125] Saint-Andre, P. and J. Hodges, "Representation and
253 Verification of Domain-Based Application Service Identity
254 within Internet Public Key Infrastructure Using X.509
255 (PKIX) Certificates in the Context of Transport Layer
256 Security (TLS)", RFC 6125, March 2011.
258 6.2. Informative References
260 [I-D.ietf-dane-srv]
261 Finch, T., Miller, M., and P. Saint-Andre, "Using DNS-
262 Based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE) TLSA records
263 with SRV and MX records.", draft-ietf-dane-srv-08 (work in
264 progress), October 2014.
266 [I-D.ietf-uta-tls-attacks]
267 Sheffer, Y., Holz, R., and P. Saint-Andre, "Summarizing
268 Current Attacks on TLS and DTLS", draft-ietf-uta-tls-
269 attacks-05 (work in progress), October 2014.
271 [I-D.ietf-xmpp-dna]
272 Saint-Andre, P. and M. Miller, "Domain Name Associations
273 (DNA) in the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol
274 (XMPP)", draft-ietf-xmpp-dna-08 (work in progress),
275 October 2014.
277 [I-D.ietf-xmpp-posh]
278 Miller, M. and P. Saint-Andre, "PKIX over Secure HTTP
279 (POSH)", draft-ietf-xmpp-posh-02 (work in progress),
280 October 2014.
282 [RFC3920] Saint-Andre, P., Ed., "Extensible Messaging and Presence
283 Protocol (XMPP): Core", RFC 3920, October 2004.
285 [RFC4033] Arends, R., Austein, R., Larson, M., Massey, D., and S.
286 Rose, "DNS Security Introduction and Requirements", RFC
287 4033, March 2005.
289 [RFC4422] Melnikov, A. and K. Zeilenga, "Simple Authentication and
290 Security Layer (SASL)", RFC 4422, June 2006.
292 [RFC5386] Williams, N. and M. Richardson, "Better-Than-Nothing
293 Security: An Unauthenticated Mode of IPsec", RFC 5386,
294 November 2008.
296 [RFC6066] Eastlake, D., "Transport Layer Security (TLS) Extensions:
297 Extension Definitions", RFC 6066, January 2011.
299 [XEP-0138]
300 Hildebrand, J. and P. Saint-Andre, "Stream Compression",
301 XSF XEP 0138, May 2009.
303 [XEP-0170]
304 Saint-Andre, P., "Recommended Order of Stream Feature
305 Negotiation", XSF XEP 0170, January 2007.
307 [XEP-0198]
308 Karneges, J., Saint-Andre, P., Hildebrand, J., Forno, F.,
309 Cridland, D., and M. Wild, "Stream Management", XSF XEP
310 0198, June 2011.
312 [XEP-0220]
313 Miller, J., Saint-Andre, P., and P. Hancke, "Server
314 Dialback", XSF XEP 0220, September 2013.
316 Appendix A. Implementation Notes
318 Some governments enforce legislation prohibiting the export of strong
319 cryptographic technologies. Nothing in this document ought to be
320 taken as advice to violate such prohibitions.
322 Appendix B. Acknowledgements
324 The authors would like to thank the following individuals for their
325 input: Dave Cridland, Philipp Hancke, Olle Johansson, Steve Kille,
326 Tobias Markmann, Matt Miller, and Rene Treffer.
328 Authors' Addresses
330 Peter Saint-Andre
331 &yet
333 Email: peter@andyet.com
334 URI: https://andyet.com/
336 Thijs Alkemade
338 Email: me@thijsalkema.de