SIDR O. Muravskiy
Internet-Draft T. Bruijnzeels
Intended status: Informational RIPE NCC
Expires: September 22, 2016 March 21, 2016

RPKI Certificate Tree Validation by a Relying Party Tool
draft-ietf-sidr-rpki-tree-validation-00

Abstract

This document currently describes the approach to validate the content of the RPKI certificate tree, as used by the RIPE NCC RPKI Validator. This approach is independent of a particular object retrieval mechanism. This allows it to be used with repositories available over the rsync protocol, the RPKI Repository Delta Protocol, and repositories that use a mix of both.

This algorithm does not rely on content of repository directories, but uses the Authority Key Identifier (AKI) field of a manifest and a certificate revocation list (CRL) objects to discover manifest and CRL objects issued by a particular Certificate Authority (CA). It further uses the hashes of manifest entries to discover other objects issued by the CA.

If the working group finds that algorithm outlined here is useful for other implementations, we may either update future revisions of this document to be less specific to the RIPE NCC RPKI Validator implementation, or we may use this document as a starting point of a generic validation document and keep this as a detailed description of the actual RIPE NCC RPKI Validator implementation.

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 http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.

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This Internet-Draft will expire on September 22, 2016.

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction

In order to use information published in RPKI repositories, Relying Parties (RP) need to retrieve and validate the content of certificates, CRLs, and other RPKI signed objects. To validate a particular object, one must ensure that all certificates in the certificate chain up to the Trust Anchor (TA) are valid. Therefore the validation of a certificate tree is usually performed top-down, starting from the TA certificate and descending down the certificate chain, validating every encountered certificate and its products. The result of this process is a list of all encountered RPKI objects with a validity status attached to each of them. These results may later be used by a Relying Party in taking routing decisions, etc.

Traditionally RPKI data is made available to RPs through the repositories [RFC6481] accessible over rsync protocol. Relying parties are advised to keep a local copy of repository data, and perform regular updates of this copy from the repository (Section 5 of[RFC6481]). The RPKI Repository Delta Protocol [I-D.ietf-sidr-delta-protocol] introduces another method to fetch repository data and keep the local copy up to date with the repository.

This document describes how a Relying Party tool could discover RPKI objects to download, build certificate path, and validate RPKI objects, independently from what repository access protocol is used. To achieve this, it puts downloaded RPKI objects in an object store, where objects could be found by their URI, hash of their content, value of the object's AKI field, or combination of these. It also keeps track of download and validation time for every object, to perform cleanups of the local copy.

2. Top-down Validation of a Single Trust Anchor Certificate Tree

The validation of a Trust Anchor (TA) certificate tree starts from its TA certificate. To retrieve the TA certificate, a Trust Anchor Locator (TAL) object is used, as described in Section 2.1.

If the TA certificate is retrieved, it is validated according to the Section 7 of [RFC6487] and Section 2.2 of [RFC7730].

Then the TA certificate and all its subordinate objects are validated as described in Section 2.2.

For all repository objects that were validated during this validation run, their validation timestamp is updated in an object store (see Section 4.1.8).

Outdated objects are removed from the store as described in Section 2.3. This completes the validation of the TA certificate tree.

2.1. Fetching the Trust Anchor Certificate Using the Trust Anchor Locator

The following steps are performed in order to fetch the Trust Anchor Certificate:

2.2. Resource Certificate Validation

The following steps describe the validation of a single resource certificate:

2.2.1. Finding most recent valid manifest and CRL

Fetch from the store (see Section 4.1.5) all objects of type manifest, whose certificate's AKI field matches the SKI of the current CA certificate.

Find the manifest object with the highest manifestNumber field (Section 4.2.1 of [RFC6486]), for which all following conditions are met:

Report an error for every invalid manifest with the number higher than the number of the valid manifest.

2.2.2. Manifest entries validation

For every entry in the manifest object:

2.3. Object Store Cleanup

At the end of the TA tree validation the store cleanup is performed:

The time intervals used in the steps above are a matter of local policy.

3. Remote Objects Fetcher

The fetcher is responsible for downloading objects from remote repositories (described in Section 3 of [RFC6481]) using rsync protocol ([rsync]), or RPKI Repository Delta Protocol (RRDP) ([I-D.ietf-sidr-delta-protocol]).

3.1. Fetcher Operations

3.1.1. Fetch repository objects

This operation receives one parameter – a URI. For rsync protocol this URI points to a directory in a remote repository. For RRDP repository it points to the repository's notification file.

The fetcher performs following steps:

3.1.2. Fetch single repository object

This operation receives one parameter – a URI that points to an object in a remote repository.

The fetcher performs following operations:

4. Local Object Store

4.1. Store Operations

4.1.1. Store Repository Object

Put given object in the store, along with its type, URI, hash, and AKI, if there is no record with the same hash and URI fields.

4.1.2. Update object's last fetch time

For all objects in the store whose URI matches the given URI, set the last fetch time attribute to the given timestamp.

4.1.3. Get objects by hash

Retrieve all objects from the store whose hash attribute matches the given hash.

4.1.4. Get certificate objects by URI

Retrieve from the store all objects of type certificate, whose URI attribute matches the given URI.

4.1.5. Get manifest objects by AKI

Retrieve from the store all objects of type manifest, whose AKI attribute matches the given AKI.

4.1.6. Delete objects for URI

For a given URI, delete all objects in the store with matching URI attribute.

4.1.7. Delete outdated objects

For a given URI and a list of hashes, delete all objects in the store with matching URI, whose hash attribute is not in the given list of hashes.

4.1.8. Update object's validation time

For all objects in the store whose hash attribute matches the given hash, set the last validation time attribute to the given timestamp.

5. Acknowledgements

This document describes the algorithm as it is implemented by the software development team at the RIPE NCC. The original idea behind it was outlined by Tim Bruijnzeels. The authors would also like to acknowledge contributions by Carlos Martinez, Andy Newton, and Rob Austein.

6. IANA Considerations

This document has no actions for IANA.

7. Security Considerations

This algorithm uses the content of a manifest object to discover other objects issued by a particular CA. It verifies that the manifest is located in the publication point designated in the CA Certificate. However, if there are other (not enlisted in the manifest) objects located in that publication point directory, they will be ignored, even if their content is correct and they are issued by the same CA as the manifest.

In contrast, objects whose content hash matches the hash listed in the manifest, but that are not located in the publication directory listed in their CA certificate, will be used in the validation process (although a warning will be issued in that case).

The store cleanup procedure described in Section 2.3 tries to minimise removal and subsequent re-fetch of objects that are published in some repository but not used in the validation. Once such objects are removed from the remote repository, they will be discarded from the local object store after a period of time specified by a local policy. By generating an excessive amount of syntactically valid RPKI objects, a man-in-the-middle attack rendered between a validating tool and a repository could force an implementation to fetch and store those objects in the object store before they are being validated and discarded, leading to an out-of-memory or out-of-disk-space conditions, and, subsequently, a denial of service.

8. References

8.1. Normative References

[RFC5280] Cooper, D., Santesson, S., Farrell, S., Boeyen, S., Housley, R. and W. Polk, "Internet X.509 Public Key Infrastructure Certificate and Certificate Revocation List (CRL) Profile", RFC 5280, DOI 10.17487/RFC5280, May 2008.
[RFC6481] Huston, G., Loomans, R. and G. Michaelson, "A Profile for Resource Certificate Repository Structure", RFC 6481, DOI 10.17487/RFC6481, February 2012.
[RFC6482] Lepinski, M., Kent, S. and D. Kong, "A Profile for Route Origin Authorizations (ROAs)", RFC 6482, DOI 10.17487/RFC6482, February 2012.
[RFC6486] Austein, R., Huston, G., Kent, S. and M. Lepinski, "Manifests for the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI)", RFC 6486, DOI 10.17487/RFC6486, February 2012.
[RFC6487] Huston, G., Michaelson, G. and R. Loomans, "A Profile for X.509 PKIX Resource Certificates", RFC 6487, DOI 10.17487/RFC6487, February 2012.
[RFC6488] Lepinski, M., Chi, A. and S. Kent, "Signed Object Template for the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI)", RFC 6488, DOI 10.17487/RFC6488, February 2012.
[RFC6493] Bush, R., "The Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) Ghostbusters Record", RFC 6493, DOI 10.17487/RFC6493, February 2012.
[RFC7730] Huston, G., Weiler, S., Michaelson, G. and S. Kent, "Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) Trust Anchor Locator", RFC 7730, DOI 10.17487/RFC7730, January 2016.

8.2. Informative References

, "
[I-D.ietf-sidr-delta-protocol] Bruijnzeels, T., Muravskiy, O., Weber, B., Austein, R. and D. Mandelberg, RPKI Repository Delta Protocol", Internet-Draft draft-ietf-sidr-delta-protocol-02, March 2016.
[rsync]Rsync home page"

Authors' Addresses

Oleg Muravskiy RIPE NCC EMail: oleg@ripe.net
Tim Bruijnzeels RIPE NCC EMail: tim@ripe.net