[Servercert-wg] Possible conflict between BR and RFC 6960?

Wed Jun 3 15:00:08 MST 2020

Hi Ryan,

I do recognize my case is getting thinner with every exchanged message and I do see the reasoning behind your answers. One thing still bothers me though: limited context is provided in RFC 6960 regarding “unknown” and “unauthorized” messages. But the one example given with a definitive response of “unknown” is “the request indicates an unrecognized issuer that is not served by this responder”. The fact that the word “usually” prefixes this example in the RFC for me indicates the authors intended this as the primary use case for using the “unknown” message. Although I concur with your observation there is no “MUST” involved so “unauthorized” can also be an option, it does feel to me like your explanation is following the letter (or rather: deductions from the letter) but not the spirit of the standard. At the very least the RFC could use a clarification!

Best regards,
Patrick van den Berg

Van: Ryan Sleevi <sleevi at google.com>
Verzonden: vrijdag 29 mei 2020 17:35
Aan: Berg, Patrick van den <Patrick.Berg at logius.nl>; CA/B Forum Server Certificate WG Public Discussion List <servercert-wg at cabforum.org>
Onderwerp: Re: [Servercert-wg] Possible conflict between BR and RFC 6960?

On Fri, May 29, 2020 at 4:06 AM Berg, Patrick van den via Servercert-wg <servercert-wg at cabforum.org<mailto:servercert-wg at cabforum.org>> wrote:
The "unknown" state indicates that the responder doesn't know about the certificate being requested, usually because the request indicates an unrecognized issuer that is not served by this responder.

Conflicting requirements
When comparing these two I can deduce the BR is stricter in who can sign a response: “a Trusted Responder whose public key is trusted by the requestor” is no longer allowed. This sounds reasonable.

Not just reasonable, necessary. A trusted responder is defined by the client, not the server; that is, it's an out-of-band mechanism to allow a client to designate a different responder than the one provided for in the certificate; similar to the approach by SCVP (RFC 5055)

However, when looking at the three definitive responses in RFC 6960, it is only possible to adhere to the BR when answering with either “good” of “revoked”. It is inherently impossible to do this for “unknown” because the issuer is unrecognized (not served by the responder).

This isn't correct. In order for this to hold, you have to read "usually" (emphasis added to your original message) as MUST; that is, that unknown can only be about that. But that's not the case, and so there's nothing wrong for using "unknown" beyond that.

For example, responding "unknown" to a non-issued serial is perfectly fine.

However, the issue in the bug is that an affirmative "unknown" was provided for a certificate for which the OCSP responder is very explicitly the responder of note, by virtue of it being included within the certificate itself, and using it with a different responder certificate than that for the CA certificate. An OCSP responder responding "unknown" for a certificate it affirmatively issued is a problem, just as an OCSP responder responding "good" for a certificate it affirmatively does not know about is an issue (and why 4.9.10 seeks to prevent it). Equally, however, responding with a signed message that doesn't validate for the certificate (that is, using a "default responder") is also a problem.

I think everybody agrees on the first part of the definition of “unauthorized” in that the client itself is not authorized to make a query. This was not relevant in the case of the bug post. I assume people thought this was about “the server is not capable of responding authoritatively”. However, “not capable of responding authoritatively” and “not an authorized responder” are two different things. The meaning of “not capable of responding authoritatively” is in fact (using a quite prosaic example) “Yes, I am in theory capable of giving an answer because I *do* know the issuer, but am just not *allowed* to because I cannot do this authoritatively; in the distributed environment I operate in the responder next to me has more up-to-date information on the requested certificate and therefore is the authoritative one”. At least, that is the only way I can interpret RFC 6960 and the example they refer to in it in RFC 5019.

And that's a scenario (responder failover) that is intentionally not supported by the BRs. The RFC 5280 approach of attempting every URL is itself fraught with peril, and that's why the BRs require there be a canonical responder capable of answering for an issued certificate, and that the canonical responder appear as an HTTP-schemed URL within the certificate.

The way I see it right now is using the work-around in the bug post does fix the issue of not signing with the right issuer certificate in accordance to the BR, but introduces a new issue of being not compliant with RFC 6960.

Does this all make sense to you, or am I overlooking or misinterpreting anything?

Yes, you're misinterpreting "usually" to mean MUST, but it's not. It's an informative example, rather than a normative restriction.

OCSP definitive response Unknown MUST be signed with a Trusted Responder whose public key is trusted by the requestor.
OCSP error responses MUST [in the RFC this is a MAY!] either:

1.      Be signed by the CA that issued the Certificates whose revocation status is being checked, or

2.      Be signed by an OCSP Responder whose Certificate is signed by the CA that issued the Certificate whose revocation status is being checked, or

3.      Be signed by a Trusted Responder whose public key is trusted by the requestor.
The question of "MAY either" in an enumerated has raised interpretive issues, although PKIX/LAMPs has aligned on "MAY either" being a "MUST only" (see, for example, the LAMPs discussion on key usages for EC), although clarity is good here. The problem, however, is that the notion of "Trusted Responder" is not something the server knows; it's a client configuration state that exists outside of the Web PKI state. It exists to allow local policy, typically enterprise policy, override or supplant the processing rules, and was envisaged as part of the monetization-of-OCSP-schemes that we saw early on in OCSP's introduction. User agents broadly don't support Trusted Responders; macOS removed support, NSS [Firefox] and Chrome never supported, and while Microsoft has this capability vis-a-vis the root certificate attributes, it's only exposed for Enterprise configuration.

The problem is we actually *want* Unknown responses to only be signed by the first two. The elimination of "Trusted Responder" is largely handled via 7.1.2.2 (c) / 7.1.2.3 (c), but I'd be supportive of making it explicit within Section 7.3 (which https://github.com/sleevi/cabforum-docs/pull/10 already begins to add to).
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