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- Network Working Group R. Braden
- Request for Comments: 1636 ISI
- Category: Informational D. Clark
- MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
- S. Crocker
- Trusted Information Systems, Inc.
- C. Huitema
- INRIA, IAB Chair
- June 1994
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- Report of IAB Workshop on
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- Security in the Internet Architecture
-
- February 8-10, 1994
-
- Status of this Memo
-
- This memo provides information for the Internet community. This memo
- does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of
- this memo is unlimited.
-
- Abstract
-
- This document is a report on an Internet architecture workshop,
- initiated by the IAB and held at USC Information Sciences Institute
- on February 8-10, 1994. This workshop generally focused on security
- issues in the Internet architecture.
-
- This document should be regarded as a set of working notes containing
- ideas about security that were developed by Internet experts in a
- broad spectrum of areas, including routing, mobility, realtime
- service, and provider requirements, as well as security. It contains
- some significant diversity of opinions on some important issues.
- This memo is offered as one input in the process of developing viable
- security mechanisms and procedures for the Internet.
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- Braden, Clark, Crocker & Huitema [Page 1]
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- RFC 1636 IAB Workshop Report June 1994
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- Table of Contents
-
- 1. INTRODUCTION .................................................. 2
- 2. OVERVIEW ...................................................... 4
- 2.1 Strategic and Political Issues ........................... 4
- 2.2 Security Issues .......................................... 4
- 2.3 DNS Names for Certificates ............................... 7
- 3. FIREWALL ARCHITECTURE ......................................... 9
- 3.1 Introduction ............................................. 9
- 3.2 Application-Layer Firewalls .............................. 11
- 3.3 IP-Layer Firewalls ....................................... 12
- 4. SECURE QOS FORWARDING ......................................... 21
- 4.1 The Requirement for Setup ................................ 21
- 4.2 Securing the Setup Process. .............................. 22
- 4.3 Validating an LLID ....................................... 24
- 4.4 Dynamics of Setup ........................................ 28
- 4.5 Receiver-Initiated Setup ................................. 30
- 4.6 Other Issues ............................................. 30
- 5. AN AUTHENTICATION SERVICE ..................................... 35
- 5.1 Names and Credentials .................................... 36
- 5.2 Identity-Based Authorization ............................. 37
- 5.3 Choosing Credentials ..................................... 38
- 6. OTHER ISSUES .................................................. 39
- 6.1 Privacy and Authentication of Multicast Groups ........... 39
- 6.2 Secure Plug-and-Play a Must .............................. 41
- 6.3 A Short-Term Confidentiality Mechanism ................... 42
- 7. CONCLUSIONS ................................................... 44
- 7.1 Suggested Short-Term Actions ............................. 44
- 7.2 Suggested Medium-Term Actions ............................ 46
- 7.3 Suggested Long-Term Actions .............................. 46
- APPENDIX A -- Workshop Organization .............................. 48
- Security Considerations .......................................... 52
- Authors' Addresses ............................................... 52
-
- 1. INTRODUCTION
-
- The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) holds occasional workshops
- designed to consider long-term issues and strategies for the
- Internet, and to suggest future directions for the Internet
- architecture. This long-term planning function of the IAB is
- complementary to the ongoing engineering efforts performed by working
- groups of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), under the
- leadership of the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) and area
- directorates.
-
- An IAB-initiated workshop on the role of security in the Internet
- Architecture was held on February 8-10, 1994 at the Information
- Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California, in
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- RFC 1636 IAB Workshop Report June 1994
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- Marina del Rey, California. This RFC reports the results of the
- workshop.
-
- In addition to the IAB members, attendees at this meeting included
- the IESG Area Directors for the relevant areas (Internet, Transport,
- Security, and IPng) and a group of 15 other experts in the following
- areas: IPng, routing, mobility, realtime service, and security (see
- Appendix for a list of attendees). The IAB explicitly tried to
- balance the number of attendees from each area of expertise.
- Logistics limited the attendance to about 30, which unfortunately
- meant that many highly qualified experts were omitted from the
- invitation list.
-
- In summary, the objectives of this workshop were (1) to explore the
- interconnections between security and the rest of the Internet
- architecture, and (2) to develop recommendations for the Internet
- community on future directions with respect to security. These
- objectives arose from a conviction in the IAB that the two most
- important problem areas for the Internet architecture are scaling and
- security. While the scaling problems have led to a flood of
- activities on IPng, there has been less effort devoted to security.
-
- Although some came to the workshop eager to discuss short-term
- security issues in the Internet, the workshop program was designed to
- focus more on long-term issues and broad principles. Thus, the
- meeting began with the following ground rule: valid topics of
- discussion should involve both security and at least one from the
- list: (a) routing (unicast and multicast), (b) mobility, and (c)
- realtime service. As a basis for initial discussion, the invitees
- met via email to generate a set of scenarios (see Appendix)
- satisfying this ground rule.
-
- The 30 attendees were divided into three "breakout" groups, with each
- group including experts in all the areas. The meeting was then
- structured as plenary meetings alternating with parallel breakout
- group sessions (see the agenda in Appendix). On the third day, the
- groups produced text summarizing the results of their discussions.
- This memo is composed of that text, somewhat rearranged and edited
- into a single document.
-
- The meeting process determined the character of this document. It
- should be regarded as a set of working notes produced by mostly-
- autonomous groups, containing some diversity of opinions as well as
- duplication of ideas. It is not the output of the "security
- community", but instead represents ideas about security developed by
- a broad spectrum of Internet experts. It is offered as a step in a
- process of developing viable security mechanisms and procedures for
- the Internet.
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- 2. OVERVIEW
-
- 2.1 Strategic and Political Issues
-
- Despite the workshop emphasis on architectural issues, there was
- considerable discussion of the real-politik of security.
-
- For a number of years, the IETF, with IAB backing, has worked on
- developing PEM, which provides email security with a great deal of
- functionality. A question was repeatedly raised at the workshop:
- why has user acceptance of PEM been slow? A number of answers to
- this question were suggested.
-
- (a) High-quality implementations have been slow in coming.
-
- (b) The use of a patented technology, the RSA algorithm, violates
- social conventions of the Internet.
-
- (c) Export restrictions dampen vendor enthusiasm.
-
- (d) PEM currently depends upon a certificate hierarchy for its
- names, and certificates form a new and complex name space.
- There is no organizational infrastructure in place for creat-
- ing and managing this name space.
-
- (e) There is no directory infrastructure available for looking up
- certificates.
-
- The decision to use X.500 has been a complete failure, due to
- the slow deployment of X.500 in the Internet. Because of UDP
- packet size restrictions, it is not currently feasible to
- store certificates in the DNS, even if the DNS were expanded
- to hold records for individual email users.
-
- It seems probable that more than one, and possibly all, of these
- reasons are at work to discourage PEM adoption.
-
- The baleful comment about eating: "Everything I enjoy is either
- immoral, illegal, or fattening" seems to apply to the cryptography
- technology that is required for Internet security.
-
- 2.2 Security Issues
-
- Almost everyone agrees that the Internet needs more and better
- security. However, that may mean different things to different
- people. Four top-level requirements for Internet security were
- identified: end-to-end security, end-system security, secure QOS,
- and secure network infrastructure.
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- A. End-to-End Security
-
- One requirement is to support confidentiality, authentication
- and integrity for end-to-end communications. These security
- services are best provided on an end-to-end basis, in order
- to minimize the number of network components that users must
- trust. Here the "end" may be the end system itself, or a
- proxy (e.g., a firewall) acting on behalf of an end system.
-
- For point-to-point applications, the workshop felt that
- existing security techniques are well suited to support
- confidentiality, authentication and integrity services
- efficiently. These existing techniques include symmetric
- encryption applied on an end-to-end basis, message digest
- functions, and key management algorithms. Current work in
- these areas in the IETF include the PEM and Common
- Authentication Technologies working groups.
-
- The group favored a strategic direction for coping with
- export restrictions: separate authentication from privacy
- (i.e., confidentiality). This will allow work to proceed on
- authentication for the Internet, despite government
- restrictions on export of privacy technology. Conversely, it
- will allow easy deployment of privacy without authentication,
- where this is appropriate.
-
- The workshop explored the implications of multicasting for
- end-to-end security. Some of the unicast security techniques
- can be applied directly to multicast applications, while
- others must be modified. Section 6.2 contains the results of
- these discussions; in summary, the conclusions were:
-
- a) Existing technology is adequate to support
- confidentiality, authentication, and integrity at the
- level of an entire multicast group. Supporting
- authentication and integrity at the level of an
- individual multicast source is performance-limited and
- will require technology advances.
-
- b) End-to-end controls should be based on end system or
- user identifiers, not low level identifiers or locator
- information. This requirement should spawn engineering
- work which consists of applying known key distribution
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- and cryptographic techniques.
-
- B. End-System Security
-
- Every host has its own security defenses, but the strength of
- these defenses depends upon the care that is taken in
- administering them. Careful host security administration
- means plugging security holes in the kernel and applications
- as well as enforcing discipline on users to set good (hard to
- crack) passwords.
-
- Good security administration is labor-intensive, and
- therefore organizations often find it difficult to maintain
- the security of a large number of internal machines. To
- protect their machines from outside subversion, organizations
- often erect an outer security wall or "perimeter". Machines
- inside the perimeter communicate with the rest of the
- Internet only through a small set of carefully managed
- machines called "firewalls". Firewalls may operate at the
- application layer, in which case they are application relays,
- or at the IP layer, in which case they are firewall routers.
-
- The workshop spent considerable time on the architecture of
- firewall routers. The results are contained in Section 3.
-
- C. Secure QOS
-
- The Internet is being extended to provide quality-of-service
- capabilities; this is the topic called "realtime service" in
- the workshop. These extensions raise a new set of security
- issues for the architecture, to assure that users are not
- allowed to attach to resources they are not authorized to
- use, both to prevent theft of resources and to prevent denial
- of service due to unauthorized traffic. The resources to be
- protected include link shares, service classes or queues,
- multicast trees, and so on. These resources are used as
- virtual channels within the network, where each virtual
- channel is intended to be used by a particular subset or
- "class" of packets.
-
- Secure QOS, i.e., protection against improper virtual channel
- usage, is a form of access control mechanism. In general it
- will be based on some form of state establishment (setup)
- that defines authorized "classes". This setup may be done
- via management configuration (typically in advance and for
- aggregates of users), or it may be done dynamically via
- control information in packets or special messages (typically
- at the time of use by the source or receiver(s) of the
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- flow/data). In addition to state establishment, some form of
- authentication will be needed to assure that successive
- packets belong to the established class. The general case to
- be solved is the multicast group, since in general the
- multicast problem includes the two-party case as a subset.
- The workshop developed an approach to the secure QOS problem,
- which appears in Section 4 below.
-
- D. Secure Network Infrastructure
-
- Network operation depends upon the management and control
- protocols used to configure and operate the network
- infrastructure, including routers and DNS servers. An attack
- on the network infrastructure may cause denial-of-service
- from the user viewpoint, but from the network operators'
- viewpoint, security from attack requires authentication and
- integrity for network control and management messages.
-
- Securing the routing protocols seems to be a straightforward
- engineering task. The workshop concluded the following.
-
- a) All routing information exchanges should be
- authenticated between neighboring routers.
-
- b) The sources of all route information should be
- authenticated.
-
- c) Although authenticating the authority of an injector of
- route information is feasible, authentication of
- operations on that routing information (e.g.,
- aggregation) requires further consideration.
-
- Securing router management protocols (e.g., SNMP, Telnet,
- TFTP) is urgent, because of the currently active threats.
- Fortunately, the design task should be a straightforward
- application of existing authentication mechanisms.
-
- Securing DNS is an important issue, but it did not receive
- much attention at the workshop.
-
- 2.3 DNS Names for Certificates
-
- As noted in Section 2.1, work on PEM has assumed the use of X.509
- distinguished names as the basis for issuing certificates, with
- public-key encryption. The most controversial discussion at the
- workshop concerned the possibility of using DNS (i.e., domain)
- names instead of X.509 distinguished names as (at least) an
- interim basis for Internet security.
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- The argument in favor of DNS names is that they are simple and
- well understood in the Internet world. It is easy for a computer
- operating in the Internet to be identified this way, and users who
- receive email on such machines already have DNS mailbox names. In
- contrast, introducing X.509 distinguished names for security will
- add a new layer of names. Most importantly, there is an existing
- administrative model for assigning DNS names. There is no
- administrative infrastructure for assigning X.509 distinguished
- names, and generating them may be too complex for early
- acceptance. The advocates of DNS names for certificates hope that
- using DNS names would encourage the widespread use of security in
- the Internet. It is expected that DNS names can be replaced later
- by a more capable naming mechanism such as X.509-based
- certificates.
-
- The basic argument against DNS names as a basis for security is
- that they are too "weak". Their use may lead to confusion in many
- instances, and this confusion can only grow as more organizations
- and individuals attach to the Internet. Some commercial email
- systems employ numeric mailbox names, and in many organizations
- there are uncertainties such as whether "bumber@foo.edu" belongs
- to Bill Umber or Tom Bumber. While it is feasible to make DNS
- names more descriptive, there is a concern that the existing
- infrastructure, with millions of short, non-descriptive names,
- will be an impediment to adoption of more descriptive names.
-
- It was noted that the question of what name space to use for
- certificates is independent of the problem of building an
- infrastructure for retrieving those names. Because of UDP packet
- size restrictions, it would not be feasible to store certificates
- in the DNS without significant changes, even if the DNS were
- expanded to hold records for individual email users.
-
- The group was unable to reach a consensus on the issue of using
- DNS names for security; further discussion in the Internet
- community is needed.
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- 3. FIREWALL ARCHITECTURE
-
- 3.1 Introduction
-
- A firewall may be used to isolate a specific connected segment of
- Internet topology. When such a segment has multiple links to the
- rest of the Internet, coordinated firewall machines are required
- on all the links.
-
- Firewalls may be implemented at different layers in the protocol
- stack. They are most commonly implemented at the application
- layer by forwarding (application) gateways, or at the IP
- (Internet) layer by filtering routers. Section 3.2 discusses
- application gateways. Section 3.3 concerns Internet-layer
- firewalls, which filter IP datagrams entering or leaving a
- security perimeter.
-
- The general architectural model for a firewall should separate
- policy, i.e., determining whether or not the requester of a
- service should be granted access to that service, from control,
- i.e., limiting access to resources to those who have been granted
- access.
-
- 3.1.1 The Use for Firewalls
-
- Firewalls are a very emotional topic in the Internet community.
- Some community members feel the firewall concept is very
- powerful because firewalls aggregate security functions in a
- single place, simplifying management, installation and
- configuration. Others feel that firewalls are damaging for the
- same reason: they provide "a hard, crunchy outside with a soft
- chewy center", i.e., firewalls foster a false sense of
- security, leading to lax security within the firewall
- perimeter. They observe that much of the "computer crime" in
- corporate environments is perpetrated by insiders, immune to
- the perimeter defense strategy. Firewall advocates counter
- that firewalls are important as an additional safeguard; they
- should not be regarded as a substitute for careful security
- management within the perimeter. Firewall detractors are also
- concerned about the difficulty of using firewalls, requiring
- multiple logins and other out-of-band mechanisms, and their
- interference with the usability and vitality of the Internet.
-
- However, firewalls are a fact of life in the Internet today.
- They have been constructed for pragmatic reasons by
- organizations interested in a higher level of security than may
- be possible without them. This section will try to outline
- some of the advantages and disadvantages of firewalls, and some
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- instances where they are useful.
-
- Consider a large organization of thousands of hosts. If every
- host is allowed to communicate directly with the outside world,
- attackers will attempt to penetrate the organization by finding
- the weakest host in the organization, breaching its defenses,
- and then using the resources of that host to extend the
- penetration further within the organization. In some sense,
- firewalls are not so much a solution to a security problem as
- they are a reaction to a more basic software
- engineering/administration problem: configuring a large number
- of host systems for good security. If this more basic problem
- could be solved, firewalls would generally be unnecessary.
-
- It is interesting to consider the effect that implementing a
- firewall has upon various individuals in the organization.
- Consider first the effect upon an organization's most secure
- host. This host basically receives little or no extra
- protection, because its own perimeter defenses are as strong or
- stronger than the firewall. In addition, the firewall will
- probably reduce the connectivity available to this host, as
- well as the reliability of the communications path to the
- outside world, resulting in inconvenience to the user(s) of
- this host. From this (most secure) user's point of view, the
- firewall is a loss.
-
- On the other hand, a host with poor security can "hide" behind
- the firewall. In exchange for a more limited ability to
- communicate with the outside world, this host can benefit from
- the higher level of security provided by the firewall, which is
- assumed to be based upon the best security available in the
- entire organization. If this host only wants to communicate
- with other hosts inside the organization, the outside
- communications limitations imposed by the firewall may not even
- be noticed. From this host's viewpoint, better security has
- been gained at little or no cost.
-
- Finally, consider the point of view of the organization as a
- whole. A firewall allows the extension of the best security in
- the organization across the whole organization. This is a
- benefit (except in the case where all host perimeter defenses
- in the organization are equal). Centralized access control
- also becomes possible, which may be either a benefit or a cost,
- depending upon the organization. The "secure" hosts within the
- organization may perceive a loss, while the "unsecure" hosts
- receive a benefit. The cost/benefit ratio to the organization
- as a whole thus depends upon the relative numbers of "secure"
- and "unsecure" hosts in the organization.
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- Consider some cases where firewalls do not make sense. An
- individual can be thought of as an organization of one host.
- The security of all the host(s) is thus (trivially) identical,
- and by definition the best available to the organization. In
- this case the choice of firewall is simple. Does this
- individual wish to communicate with the outside or not? If
- not, then the "perfect" firewall is implemented (by complete
- disconnection). If yes, then the host perimeter will be the
- same as the firewall perimeter, so a firewall becomes
- unnecessary.
-
- Another interesting case is an organization that consists of
- individuals with few shared interests. This might be the case
- of a service provider that sells public access to the network.
- An unrelated community of subscribers should probably be
- considered as individuals, rather than an organization.
- Firewalls for the whole organization may make little sense in
- this case.
-
- To summarize, the benefit of a firewall depends upon the nature
- of the organization it protects. A firewall can be used to
- extend the best available protection within the organization
- across the entire organization, and thus be of benefit to large
- organizations with large numbers of poorly administered hosts.
- A firewall may produce little or no perceived benefit, however,
- to the individuals within an organization who have strong host
- perimeters already.
-
- 3.2 Application-Layer Firewalls
-
- An application-layer firewall can be represented by the following
- diagram.
-
- C <---> F <---> S
-
- Here the requesting client C opens its transport connection to the
- firewall F rather than directly to the desired server S. One
- mechanism for redirecting C's request to F's IP address rather
- than S's could be based on the DNS. When C attempts to resolve
- S's name, its DNS lookup would return a "service redirection"
- record (analogous to an MX record) for S. The service redirection
- record would return the IP address of F.
-
- C enters some authentication conversation to identify itself to F,
- and specifies its intention to request a specific service from S.
- F then decides if C is authorized to invoke this service. If C is
- authorized, F initiates a transport layer connection to S and
- begins the operation, passing requests and responses between C and
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- S.
-
- A major advantage of this scenario over an IP-layer firewall is
- that raw IP datagrams are never passed through the firewall.
- Because the firewall operates at the application layer, it has the
- opportunity to handle and verify all data passing through it, and
- it may be more secure against illicit rendezvous attacks (see
- below).
-
- Application layer firewalls also have important disadvantages.
- For full benefit, an application level firewall must be coded
- specifically for each application. This severely limits the
- deployment of new applications. The firewall also represents a
- new point of failure; if it ceases to be reachable, the
- application fails. Application layer firewalls also may affect
- performance more than IP-layer firewalls, depending on specific
- mechanisms in use.
-
- 3.3 IP-Layer Firewalls
-
- Our model of an IP-layer firewall is a multi-ported IP router that
- applies a set of rules to each incoming IP datagram, to decide
- whether it will be forwarded. It is said to "filter" IP
- datagrams, based on information available in the packet headers.
-
- A firewall router generally has a set of filtering rules, each of
- which specifies a "packet profile" and an "action". The packet
- profile specifies values for particular header fields, e.g.,
- source and destination IP address, protocol number, and other
- suitable source and destination identifying information (for
- instance, port numbers). The set of possible information that may
- be used to match packets is called an "association". The exact
- nature of an association is an open issue.
-
- The high-speed datagram forwarding path in the firewall processes
- every arriving packet against all the packet profiles of all
- active rules, and when a profile matches, it applies the
- corresponding action. Typical actions may include forwarding,
- dropping, sending a failure response, or logging for exception
- tracking. There may be a default rule for use when no other rule
- matches, which would probably specify a drop action.
-
- In addition to the packet profile, some firewalls may also use
- some cryptographic information to authenticate the packet, as
- described below in section 3.3.2.
-
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- 3.3.1 Policy Control Level
-
- This section presents a model for the control of a firewall
- router, with some examples of specific mechanisms that might be
- used.
-
- 1. A client C attempts to access a service S. (Client here
- can mean either a person or a process - that also is an
- issue to be resolved.)
-
- 2. The initiation of access to that service may result in an
- attempt to cross one or more boundaries of protection via
- firewall router(s).
-
- 3. The policy control level sets filters in the firewall
- router(s), to permit or deny that attempt.
-
- The policy control level consists of two distinct functions,
- authentication and authorization. Authentication is the
- function of verifying the claimed identity of a user. The
- authentication function should be distributed across the
- Internet, so that a user in one organization can be
- authenticated to another organization. Once a user is
- authenticated, it is then the job of the authorization service
- local to the resource being requested to determine if that user
- is authorized to access that resource. If authorization is
- granted, the filter in the firewall can be updated to permit
- that access.
-
- As an aid to understanding the issues, we introduce a
- particular detailed mechanism. We emphasize that this
- mechanism is intended only as an illustrative example; actual
- engineering of the mechanism will no doubt lead to many
- changes. Our mechanism is illustrated by the following sketch.
- Here a user wishes to connect from a computer C behind firewall
- F1, to a server S behind firewall F2. A1 is a particular
- authentication server and Z1 is a particular authorization
- server.
-
- C <-------> F1 <-------> F2 <-------> S
- \ /
- \_____ /
- \ \ /
- A1 Z1
-
- C attempts to initiate its conversation by sending an initial
- packet to S. C uses a normal DNS lookup to resolve S's name,
- and uses normal IP routing mechanisms. C's packet reaches
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- firewall router F1, which rejects the packet because it does
- not match any acceptable packet profile. F1 returns an
- "Authentication Required" error indication to C, including a
- list of authentication/authorization servers that F1 trusts.
- This indication might be a new type of ICMP Destination
- Unreachable packet, or some other mechanism for communicating
- with C.
-
- When C receives the error indication, authenticates itself with
- A1, one of the authentication servers listed in the error
- indication, after validating A1's identity. C then requests
- authorization from server Z1 (using a ticket provided by A1),
- informs Z1 of the application it wishes to perform, and
- provides a profile for the packets it wishes to pass through
- F1. Z1 then performs an authorization function to decide
- whether to allow C to penetrate F1. If C is to be allowed, Z1
- then informs the firewall F1 to allow packets matching the
- packet profile to pass through the firewall F1.
-
- After C's packets penetrate F1, they may again be rejected by a
- second firewall F2. C could perform the same procedures with
- authentication server A2 and authorization server Z2, which F2
- trusts. This is illustrated by the following schematic diagram
- of the sequence of events.
-
-
-
-
-
-
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-
-
- ----------+--------+--------+------------+------------+----
- | C | A1 | Z1 | F1 | F2 | S
- ----------+--------+--------+------------+------------+----
- | Sends pkt| | | | |
- | to S ----------------------->Intercept;| |
- | | | | requires | |
- | | | |authenticat'n |
- | <------------------------------- | |
- |Auth'cate | | | | |
- | C to A1 ----> | | | |
- | |Provide | | | |
- | <------- ticket| | | |
- | Request | | | | |
- |authoriz'n| | | | |
- | -------------------> Is C| | |
- | | |allowed?| | |
- | | | OK ---------> | |
- |Resend | | | Set filter | |
- | first pkt| | | | |
- | to S -------------------------->(OK)------>Intercept;|
- | | | | | requires |
- | | | | |authenticat'n
- | <------------------------------------------- |
- | (Repeat | | | | |
- |procedure | | | | |
- with A2,Z2)| | | | |
- | ... | | | | |
- |Resend | | | | |
- | first pkt| | | | |
- | ------------------------------>(OK)--------(OK)------>
- | | | | | |
- -----------+--------+--------+------------+------------+----
-
-
- Again, we emphasize that this is only intended as a partial
- sketch of one possible mechanism. It omits some significant
- issues, including the possibility of asymmetric routes (see
- 3.3.3 below), and the possibility that the profiles may be
- different in the two directions between C and S.
-
- We could imagine generalizing this to an arbitrary sequence of
- firewalls. However, security requires that each of the
- firewalls be able to verify that data packets actually come
- from C. This packet authentication problem, which is discussed
- in the next section, could be extremely difficult if the data
- must traverse more than one or possibly two firewalls in
- sequence.
-
-
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-
- A firewall router may require re-authentication because:
-
- * it has been added to the path by a routing change, or
-
- * it has timed out the profile entry, or
-
- * it has been newly re-activated, perhaps after a crash that
- lost its list of acceptable profiles.
-
- If C contacts authentication and authorization servers that S
- trusts, C may utilize tickets given it by these servers when
- initiating its use of S, and avoid re-authenticating itself to
- S.
-
- Although the authentication server A1 and the authorization
- server Z1 are conceptually separate, they may run on the same
- computer or router or even be separate aspects of a single
- program. The protocol that C speaks to an An, the protocol
- that C speaks to a Zn, and the protocol that Zn speaks to Fn
- are not specified in these notes. The authentication mechanism
- used with An and the packet profile required by a firewall Fn
- are considered matters of policy.
-
- 3.3.2 Source Authentication
-
- We next consider how to protect against spoofing the IP source
- address, i.e., injecting packets that are alleged from come
- from C but do not. There are three classes of mechanisms to
- prevent such spoofing of IP-level firewalls. The mechanisms
- outlined here are also discussed in Section 4.3 below.
-
- o Packet Profile Only
-
- The lowest level of security consists of allowing the IP-
- layer firewall to filter packets purely on the basis of
- the packet profile. This is essentially the approach used
- by filtering routers today, with the addition of (1)
- authentication and authorization servers to control the
- filtering profiles, and (2) the automatic "Authentication
- Required" notification mechanism. This approach provides
- almost no security; it does not prevent other computers
- from spoofing packets that appear to be transmitted by C,
- or from taking over C's transport level connection to S.
-
- o Sealed Packets
-
- In the second level of security, each packet is "sealed"
- with a secure hash algorithm. An authentication server Ai
-
-
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-
- chooses a secret and shares it with the source host S and
- also with the authorization server Zi, which shares the
- secret with the firewall Fi. Every packet that C
- transmits contains a hash value that depends upon both the
- contents of the packet and the secret value. The firewall
- Fi can compute the same hash function and verify that the
- packet was originated by a computer that knew the shared
- secret.
-
- This approach does raise issues of how much C trusts Zi
- and Fi. Since they know C's secret, Zi or Fi could spoof
- C. If C does not trust all Z's and F's in its path, a
- stronger mechanism (see below) is needed.
-
- A more difficult problem arises in authenticating C's
- packets when more than one firewall lies in the path.
- Carrying a separate seal for each firewall that is
- penetrated would be costly in terms of packet size. On
- the other hand, in order to use a single seal, all the
- firewalls would have to cooperate, and this might require
- a much more complex mechanism than the one sketched in the
- previous section. Morever, it may require mutual trust
- among all of the authentication servers Ai and
- authorization servers Zi; any of these servers could
- undermine all the others. Another possibility to be
- investigated is to use hop-by-hop rather than end-to-end
- authentication of C's packets. That is, each firewall
- would substitute into the packet the hash needed by the
- next firewall.
-
- Multi-firewall source authentication is a difficult
- problem that needs more investigation.
-
- o Packet Signatures
-
- In the third level of security, each packet is "signed"
- using a public/private key algorithm. C shares its public
- key with Zn, which shares it with Fn. In this scenario, C
- can safely use one pair of keys for all authorization
- servers and firewalls. No authorization server or
- firewall can spoof C because they cannot sign packets
- correctly.
-
- Although packet signing gives a much higher level of
- security, it requires public key algorithms that are
- patented and currently very expensive to compute; their
- time must be added to that for the hash algorithm. Also,
- signing the hash generally makes it larger.
-
-
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-
- 3.3.3 Other Firewall Issues
-
- o Performance
-
- An Internet-layer firewall has the advantage of generality
- and flexibility. However, filtering introduces a
- potential performance problem. Performance may depend
- upon the number and position of the packet fields used for
- filtering, and upon the number of rules against which a
- packet has to be matched.
-
- Denial of service attacks require that the per-packet rule
- matching and the drop path be able to keep up with the
- interface speed.
-
- o Multicasting
-
- To allow multicast traffic to penetrate a firewall, the
- rule that is needed should be supplied by the receiver
- rather than the sender. However, this will not work with
- the challenge mechanism outlined in Section 3.3.1, since
- "Authentication Required" notifications would be sent to
- the sender, not to the receiver(s).
-
- Multicast conversations may use any of the three levels of
- security described in the previous section, but all
- firewalls will have to share the same secret with the
- originator of the data stream. That secret would have to
- be provided to the receivers through other channels and
- then passed to the firewalls at the receivers' initiative
- (in much the same way that resources are reserved at
- receiver's initiative in RSVP).
-
- o Asymmetric Routing
-
- Given a client computer C utilizing a service from another
- computer C through a firewall F: if the packets returning
- from S to C take a different route than packets from C to
- S, they may encounter another firewall F' which has not
- been authorized to pass packets from S to C (unlike F,
- which has been). F' will challenge S rather than C, but S
- may not have credentials to authenticate itself with a
- server trusted by F'.
-
- Fortunately, this asymmetric routing situation is not a
- problem for the common case of single homed administrative
- domains, where any asymmetric routes converge at the
- firewall.
-
-
-
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-
- o Illicit Rendezvous
-
- None of these mechanisms prevent two users on opposite
- sides of a firewall from rendezvousing with a custom
- application written over a protocol that may have been
- authorized to run through a firewall.
-
- For example, if an organization has a policy that certain
- information is sensitive and must not be allowed outside
- its premises, a firewall will not be enough to enforce
- this policy if users are able to attach sensitive
- information to mail and send it outside to arbitrary
- parties. Similarly, a firewall will not prevent all
- problems with incoming data. If users import programs and
- execute them, the programs may have Trojan horses which
- disclose sensitive information or modify or delete
- important data. Executable code comes in many, many
- forms, including PostScript files, scripts for various
- interpreters, and even return addresses for sendmail. A
- firewall can detect some of these and scan for some forms
- of potentially hazardous code, but it cannot stop users
- from transforming things that look like "data" into
- programs.
-
- We consider these problems to be somewhat outside the
- scope of the firewall router mechanism. It is a matter of
- the policies implemented by the organization owning the
- firewalls to address these issues.
-
- o Transparency for Security Packets
-
- For the mechanisms described above to operate, the
- "Authentication Required" notification and the
- authentication/authorization protocol that is used between
- the client computer and the authentication and
- authorization servers trusted by a firewall, must be
- passed by all firewalls automatically. This might be on
- the basis of the packet profiles involved in security.
- Alternatively, firewall routers might serve as
- application-layer firewalls for these types of
- communications. They could then validate the data they
- pass to avoid spoofing or illicit rendezvous.
-
- 3.3.4 Firewall-Friendly Applications
-
- Firewall routers have problems with certain communication
- patterns where requests are initiated by the server, including
- callbacks and multiple connections (e.g., FTP). It was
-
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- suggested that it would be useful to have guidelines to
- application designers to help them to build 'firewall-friendly
- applications'. The following guidelines were suggested:
-
- 1) no inbound calls (the xterm problem),
-
- 2) fixed port numbers (no portmapper or tcpmux),
-
- 3) integral redirection is good (application gateways),
-
- 4) no redirection in the protocol,
-
- 5) 32 bit sequence numbers that are crypto-strong random #'s,
- and
-
- 6) fixed length and number of header fields.
-
- Type fields are good, but they may not be needed if there are
- fixed port numbers.
-
- 3.3.5 Conclusions
-
- Compared to an application-layer firewall, an IP-layer firewall
- scheme could provide a number of benefits:
-
- - No extra authentication is required for end hosts.
-
- - A single authentication protocol can be used for all
- intended applications.
-
- - An IP-layer firewall causes less performance degradation.
-
- - An IP-layer firewall may be able to crash and recover
- state without disturbing open TCP connections.
-
- - Routes can shift without disturbing open TCP connections.
-
- - There is no single point of failure.
-
- - It is independent of application.
-
- However, there are substantial difficult design issues to be
- solved, particularly in the areas of multiple firewalls,
- assymmetric routes, multicasting, and performance.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
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-
- 4. SECURE QOS FORWARDING
-
- When the Internet supports special qualities-of-service (QOS) for
- particular packet flows, there will be a new set of security
- problems. There will be a need to authenticate and authorize users
- asking for those QOS values that are expensive in network resources,
- and it will be necessary to prevent theft of these resources and
- denial-of-service attacks by others. This section contains a
- conceptual model for these problems, which we may call secure QOS
- forwarding. The issues here differ from end-to-end security and
- firewalls, because QOS forwarding security may need to be enforced at
- every router along a path.
-
- It was noted that this is not a new problem; it was stated and solved
- in a theoretical way in a thesis by Radia Perlman.
-
- 4.1 The Requirement for Setup
-
- Setup is an essential part of any QOS mechanism. However, it may
- be argued that there are also good engineering reasons for setup
- in any Internet-layer security mechanism, even without QOS
- support. In the abstract, one could imagine a pure datagram model
- in which each IP packet separately carried the necessary
- authorizations for all the stages in the forwarding path.
- Realistically, this is not practical, since the security
- information may be both unacceptably large and computationally
- demanding for inclusion in every packet. This seems to imply the
- need for some form of state setup for security.
-
- Thus, we presume a two stage process that moves somewhat away from
- the pure datagram model. In the first stage, the setup stage,
- some state is established in the routers (and other network
- elements) that describes how a subsequent stream of packets is to
- be treated. In the second stage, the classification stage, the
- arriving packets are matched with the correct state information
- and processed. The terminology in use today calls these different
- state descriptions "classes", and the process of sorting
- "classification".
-
- Setup can take many forms. It could be dynamic, invoked across
- the network by an application as described above. The setup
- process could also be the manual configuration of a router by
- means of a protocol such as SNMP or remote login. For example, a
- network link, such as a link across the Atlantic, might be shared
- by a number of users who purchase it jointly. They might
- implement this sharing by configuring a router with
- specifications, or filters, which describe the sorts of packets
- that are permitted to use each share. Whether the setup is
-
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- dynamic or manual, short-lived or semi-permanent, it has the same
- effect: it creates packet classes in the router and defines how
- packets are to be classified as they arrive.
-
- Much of the current research on extensions to IP for QOS, such as
- realtime service, has assumed an explicit setup phase and a
- classification stage. The setup stage is accomplished using
- protocols such as RSVP or ST-II, which also specify how the
- subsequent classification is to be done. Security at the setup
- stage would thus simply be an extension to such a protocol. It
- should be noted that there are alternative proposals for realtime
- QOS, based on an implicit setup process.
-
- 4.2 Securing the Setup Process.
-
- To secure the setup process, we require that a setup request be
- accompanied by user credentials that provide a trustworthy
- assurance that the requester is known and is authorized to make
- the request in question. We refer to the credentials used in the
- setup phase as the high-level identification (HLID).
-
- A simple version of this authorization would be a password on the
- management interface to a router (the limitations of such a
- password scheme are well known and not the issue here). In the
- case of setup requests made by individual applications, some
- user-specific authorization must be assumed.
-
- While there could be any number of ways to organize the HLIDs, the
- objective of scaling suggests that a global framework for user
- naming and authentication would be useful. The choice of naming
- framework is discussed further in Section 5. Note that this
- discussion, which concerns controlling access to network resources
- and security devices, is distinct from end-to-end authentication
- and access control; however, the same authentication
- infrastructure could be used for both.
-
- In general, while significant engineering effort will be required
- to define a setup architecture for the Internet, there is no need
- to develop new security techniques. However, for the security
- aspects of the classification process, there are significant
- problems related to performance and cost. We thus focus on that
- aspect of the overall framework in more detail.
-
- Above, we defined the high-level ID (HLID) as that set of
- information presented as part of a setup request. There may also
- be a "low-level ID" (LLID), sometimes called a "cookie", carried
- in each packet to drive classification. In current proposals for
- IP extensions for QOS, packets are classified based on existing
-
-
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-
- packet fields, e.g., source and destination addresses, ports, and
- protocol type.
-
- It is important to note that the LLID is distinct from the address
- of the user, at least conceptually. By stressing this distinction
- we make the point that the privileges of the user are not
- determined by the address in use. If the user's address changes,
- the privileges do not.
-
- The LLID in a packet acts as a form of tag that is used by some or
- all routers along a path to make decisions about the sort of QOS
- that shall be granted to this packet. An LLID might refer to a
- data stream between a single source-destination address pair, or
- it might be more general and encompass a range of data streams.
- There is no requirement that the LLID embody a syntax that permits
- a router to discern the QOS parameters that it represents, but
- there also is no prohibition against imposing such a structure.
-
- We propose that an IP datagram contain one LLID, which can be used
- at various stages of the network to map the packet to a class. We
- reject the alternative that the packet should have a variable
- number of LLIDs, each one for a different point in the net.
- Again, this is not just a security comment, but it has security
- implications.
-
- The attributes of the LLID should be picked to match as broad a
- range of requirements as possible.
-
- * Its duration (discussed below) must match both the needs of
- the security protocol, balancing robustness and efficiency,
- and the needs of the application, which will have to deal
- with renewal of the setup when the LLID expires. A useful
- end-node facility would be a service to renew setup requests
- automatically.
-
- * The degree of trust must be high enough to meet the most
- stringent requirement we can reasonably meet.
-
- * The granularity of the LLID structure must permit packet
- classification into classes fine-grained enough for any
- resource selection in the network. We should therefore
- expect that each separate stream of packets from an
- application will have a distinct LLID. There will be little
- opportunity for aggregating multiple streams under one LLID
- or one authenticator.
-
-
-
-
-
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-
- 4.3 Validating an LLID
-
- At a minimum, it is necessary to validate the use of an LLID in
- context, i.e., to ensure that it is being asserted in an
- authorized fashion. Unauthorized use of an LLID could result in
- theft of service or denial-of-service attacks, where packets not
- emitted by an authorized sender are accorded the QOS treatment
- reserved for that sender (or for a group of which the sender is a
- member). Thus, use of an LLID should be authenticated by routers
- that make QOS decisions based on that LLID. (Note that not all
- routers may "pay attention" to the LLID.)
-
- In principle, the validity of an LLID assertion needs to be
- checked on every packet, though not necessarily at every router;
- it may be possible to restrict the checks to security perimeters.
- At those routers that must validate LLIDs, there is an obvious
- concern over the performance impact. Therefore, a router may
- adopt a less rigorous approach to LLID validation. For example, a
- router may elect to sample a data stream and validate some, but
- not all, packets. It may also elect to forward packets first and
- perform selective validation as a background activity. In the
- least stringent approach, a router might log selected packets and
- validate them as part of an audit activity much later.
-
- There are several candidate techniques for validating the use of
- LLIDs. We have identified three basic techniques, which differ in
- terms of computational performance, bandwidth overhead, and
- effectiveness (resistance to various forms of attack).
-
- * Digital Signatures
-
- The first technique entails the use of public key
- cryptography and digital signatures. The sender of each
- packet signs the packet (header and payload) by computing a
- one-way hash over the packet and transforming the hash value
- using a private key associated with the LLID. The resulting
- authenticator value is included in the packet header. The
- binding between the public key and the LLID is established
- through a connection setup procedure that might make use of
- public keys that enjoy a much longer lifetime. Using public
- key technology yields the advantage that any router can
- validate a packet, but no router is entrusted with data that
- would enable it to generate a packet with a valid
- authenticator (i.e., which would be viewed as valid by other
- routers.) This characteristic makes this technique ideal
- from the standpoint of the "principle of least privilege."
-
-
-
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-
- Public key cryptosystems such as RSA have the advantage that
- validation of a signature is much faster than signing, which
- reduces the router processing burden. Nonetheless, this
- approach is not likely to be feasible for anything other than
- selective checking by routers, given current public key
- algorithm performance.
-
- * Sealing
-
- The next technique is based on the use of the same type of
- one-way hash function used for digital signatures, but it
- does not require signing the hash value. Here the sender
- computes a one-way hash with a secret quantity (essentially a
- "key") appended to the packet. This process is an example of
- what is sometimes referred to more generically as
- cryptographic "sealing." The inclusion of this key at the
- end of the hash computation results in a hash value that is
- not predictable by any entity not possessing the key. The
- resulting hash value is the authenticator and is included in
- the packet header. A router validates a packet by
- recomputing the hash value over the received packet with the
- same secret quantity appended. If the transmitted hash value
- matches the recomputed hash value, the packet is declared
- valid. Unlike the signature technique, sealing implies that
- all routers capable of verifying a seal are also capable of
- generating (forging) a seal. Thus, this technique requires
- that the sender trust the routers not to misuse the key.
-
- This technique has been described in terms of a single secret
- key shared between the sender and all the routers that need
- to validate packets associated with an LLID. A related
- alternative strategy uses the same authenticator technique,
- but shares the secret key on a pairwise basis, e.g., between
- the sender and the first router, between the first router and
- the next, etc. This avoids the need to distribute the secret
- key among a large group of routers, but it requires that the
- setup mechanism enable Router A to convince his neighbor
- (Router B) that Router A is authorized to represent traffic
- on a specific LLID or set of LLIDs. This might best be done
- by encapsulating the packet inside a wrapper that both ends
- of the link can validate. Once this strategy is in place, it
- may even be most efficient for routers to aggregate traffic
- between them, providing authentication not on a per-LLID
- basis, since the router pairs are prepared to "trust" one
- another to accurately represent the data stream LLIDs.
-
- For a unicast data stream, the use of pairwise keying between
- routers does not represent a real change in the trust
-
-
-
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-
- required of the routers or of the setup mechanism, because of
- the symmetric sharing of the secret key. However, for a
- multicast connection, this pairwise keying approach is
- superior in that it prevents a router at one point in a
- multicast tree from being able to generate traffic that could
- be inserted at another point in the tree. At worst, a router
- can generate spurious, but authenticatable, traffic only for
- routers "below" it in the multicast tree.
-
- Note that the use of network management fault isolation
- techniques, e.g., sampling router traffic statistics at
- different points along a data stream, should permit post hoc
- detection of packet forgery attacks mounted by rogue routers
- along a data stream path. Use of this technique could
- provide a deterrent to such activity by routers, further
- arguing for the pairwise keying approach.
-
- The sealing technique is faster than the digital signature
- technique, because the incremental hash calculation
- (including the appended secret quantity) is much faster than
- the cryptographic transformation required to sign a hash.
- The processing burden is symmetric here, i.e., the sender and
- each router devote the same amount of processing power to
- seal a packet and to verify the seal. Also, a sealed hash
- may be smaller than a signed hash, even if the same function
- is used in both cases. (This is because the modulus size of
- the public key signature algorithm and any ancillary
- parameters tend to increase the size of the signed hash
- value.) Moreover, one could use a hash function with a
- "wide" value and truncate that value, if necessary to reduce
- overhead; this option is not available when the authenticator
- is a signed hash value.
-
- As a variant on this technique, one could imagine a
- "clearinghouse" that would receive, from the sender, the
- secret key used to generate and validate authenticators. A
- router needing to validate a packet would send a copy of the
- packet to the clearinghouse, which would check the packet and
- indicate to the router whether it was a valid packet
- associated with the LLID in question. Obviously, this
- variant is viable only if the router is performing
- infrequent, selective packet validation. However, it does
- avoid the need to share the authenticator secret among all
- the routers that must validate packets.
-
- For both of these techniques, there is a residual
- vulnerability to denial-of-service attacks based on replay of
- valid packets during the lifetime of a data stream. Unless
-
-
-
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- packets carry sequence numbers and routers track a sequence
- number window for each data stream, an (external) attacker
- can copy valid packets and replay them. It may be easiest to
- protect against this form of attack by aggregating all
- traffic between a pair of routers into a single flow and
- providing replay protection for the flow as a whole, rather
- than on a per data stream basis.
-
- * Temporary Passwords
-
- The final technique explored in the workshop takes a very
- different tack to packet validation. The preceding
- techniques compute a function of the bits in a packet and
- transform that value in a fashion that prevents an intruder
- from generating packets with valid authenticators. The
- ability to generate packets with valid authenticators for a
- given LLID requires access to a secret value that is
- available only to the sender, or to the sender and to routers
- participating in a given data stream.
-
- In contrast, this third technique calls for the authenticator
- to be a short term, secret quantity that is carried in the
- packet header, without benefit of further protection. In
- essence, this technique incorporates a short term "password"
- into each packet header. This approach, like its
- predecessor, requires that all of the routers validating the
- LLID be privy to this authenticator. Moreover, the
- authenticator is visible to any other router or other
- equipment along the path, and thus this technique is much
- more vulnerable than the previous ones.
-
- Here the same authenticator may be applied to all packets
- with the same LLID, since the authenticator is not a function
- of the packet it authenticates. In fact, this suggests that
- it is feasible to use the LLID as the authenticator.
- However, adopting this tack would not be consistent with the
- two previous techniques, each of which requires an explicit,
- separate authenticator, and so we recommend against this
- optimization.
-
- Nonetheless, the fact that the authenticator is independent
- of the packet context makes it trivial to generate (forge)
- apparently authentic packets if the authenticator is
- intercepted from any legitimate packet. Also, if the
- authenticator can be guessed, an attacker need not even
- engage in passive wiretapping to defeat this scheme. This
- latter observation suggests that the authenticator must be of
- sufficient size to make guessing unlikely, and making the
-
-
-
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-
- LLID and the authenticator separate further supports this
- requirement.
-
- The major advantage of this approach is one of performance.
- The authenticator can be validated very quickly through a
- simple comparison. Consistent with the need to protect
- against guessing attacks, the authenticator need not consume
- a significant amount of space in the packet header.
-
- The use of a sequence number visible to the routers is an
- interesting technique to explore to make these somewhat
- vulnerable methods more robust. If each stream (each source
- of packets) numbers its packets, then an intruder attempting
- to use the network resource must delete the legitimate
- packets, which in many cases would be difficult. Otherwise,
- the router being attacked would notice duplicate sequence
- numbers and similar anomalies. The exact details of the
- numbering would have to be worked out, since for the
- legitimate stream packets might be lost, which would cause
- holes in the sequence space.
-
- We do not consider here the issues of collusion, in which a user
- with a given LLID and authenticator deliberately shares this with
- another unauthorized user. This possibility should be explored,
- to see if there is a practical advantage to this act, and thus a
- real threat.
-
- 4.4 Dynamics of Setup
-
- o Duration of LLID's
-
- A key question in the use of LLIDs is how long they remain
- valid. At one extreme, they last only a very short time,
- perhaps seconds. This limits the damage that can be done if
- the authenticator for the LLID is stolen. At the other
- extreme, LLIDs are semi-permanent, like credit card numbers.
- The techniques proposed above for securing the LLID traded
- strength for efficiency, under the assumption that the peril
- was limited by the limited validity of the LLID.
-
- The counterbalancing advantage of long-term or semi-permanent
- LLIDs is that it becomes practical to use primitive setup
- techniques, such as manual configuration of routers to
- establish packet classes. This will be important in the
- short run, since deployment of security and dynamic resource
- allocation protocols may not exactly track in time.
-
-
-
-
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-
- We conclude that the correct short-term action is to design
- LLIDs under the assumption that they are fairly short lived,
- and to tolerate, in the short run, a longer period of
- validity. This would imply that we will get an acceptable
- long-term mechanism in place, which operationally will have a
- lower level of security at first. As we get better tools for
- automatic setup, we can shorten the duration of validity on a
- individual basis, without replacing mechanism in the packet
- forwarding path.
-
- o Setup Latency
-
- The tradition of the Internet is not to impose any setup
- latency in the communication path between end nodes. This
- supports the classic datagram model for quick transactions,
- etc., and it is a feature that should be preserved.
-
- For setup that is done "in advance", either through a
- management interface or by an end-node in the background, the
- issue of latency does not arise. The latency issue occurs
- for dynamic reservations made in response to a specific
- application request.
-
- We observe that while latency is a key issue, it is not
- materially influenced by security concerns. The designers of
- resource reservation protocols such as RSVP and ST-II are
- debating the latency of these protocols today, absent
- security. Adding an authenticator to the request message
- will increase the processing needed to validate the request,
- and might even imply a message exchange with an
- authentication service, but should not substantially change
- the real time of the setup stage, which might already take
- time on the order of a round-trip delay. But the design of
- the high level authentication and authorization methods for
- the setup protocol should understand that this process, while
- not demanding at the level of the per-packet processing, is
- still somewhat time-critical.
-
- One way of dealing with an expensive setup process is to set
- up the request provisionally and perform the validation in
- the background. This would limit the damage from one bad
- setup request to a short period of time. Note, however, that
- the system is still vulnerable to an attack that uses a
- sequence of setup requests, each of which allows unauthorized
- usage for at least a short period of time.
-
- Note also that a denial-of-service attack can be mounted by
- flooding the setup process with invalid setup requests, all
-
-
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- of which need to be processed and rejected. This could
- prevent a valid user from setting up any state. However,
- denial-of-service attacks based upon flooding leave very
- large "finger prints"; they should not normally be an
- important threat. If it is a problem, it may be possible to
- incorporate a mechanism at the level of setup processing that
- is equivalent to "fair queueing", to limits the damage from a
- flooding attack at the packet level.
-
- 4.5 Receiver-Initiated Setup
-
- Recent work on a QOS extension for the Internet, embodied in the
- RSVP protocol, uses the model that the receiver will reserve
- resources. This scheme is consistent with the current IP
- multicast paradigm, which requires the receiver to join the
- multicast group. The receiver reserves the resources to insure
- that the multicast traffic reaches the receiver with the desired
- QOS. In this case, it is the credentials (the HLIDs) of the
- receivers that will be presented to the setup phase.
-
- Note that receiver initiation requires an explicit setup phase.
- Suppose setup were implicit, driven by pre-existing fields in the
- packet. Then there would be no way to associate a packet with a
- particular receiver, since in multicast, the address of the
- receiver never appears in the packet.
-
- Further, it is impossible in this case to perform a setup "in
- advance", unless the sender and the receiver are very tightly co-
- ordinated; otherwise, the receiver will not know in advance what
- LLID will be in the packet. It is certainly impossible, in this
- case, for the receiver to set up "semi-permanent" reservations for
- multicast traffic coming to it. This, again, is not a security
- issue; the problem exists without adding security concerns, but
- the security architecture must take it into account.
-
- 4.6 Other Issues
-
- 4.6.1 Encrypting Firewalls and Bypass
-
- Our view of security, both end node and network protection,
- includes the use of firewalls, which partition the network into
- regions of more or less trust. This idea has something in
- common with the encrypting-firewall model used in the
- military/intelligence community: red (trusted) networks
- partitioned from black (untrusted) networks. The very
- significant difference is that, in the military model, the
- partition uses an encryption unit that encodes as much as
- possible of the packet for its trip across the black network to
-
-
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- another red network. That is, the purpose of the encryption
- unit, among others, is to provide a very high degree of
- protection against disclosure for data housed within the red
- networks. In contrast, our version of a firewall is more to
- protect the trusted (red) region of the network from outside
- attacks. It is concerned both with what comes in and with what
- goes out. It does permit communication between a node on the
- trusted and nodes in the untrusted parts of the network.
-
- We would like to be able to adapt our model of secure QOS to
- the case of military-style encrypting firewalls. However, this
- use of encryption raises a problem with our model of secure
- resource management, discussed above, which was based on a
- two-stage process of setup and classification. This model is
- problematic because it requires information to pass from the
- red region to the black region in the clear. This information
- includes both the setup packets themselves, if setup is done
- dynamically from the end node, and the classification fields
- (the LLIDs) in the data packets. Obviously, this information
- cannot be encrypted when leaving the red region of the network,
- since it would then be meaningless to the black net, so that
- the black network would be unable to make resource allocation
- decisions based on it.
-
- To make this sort of control scheme work, it is necessary for
- the encryption device to be programmed to permit certain
- packets and fields in packets to pass through the encryptor in
- the clear. This bypass of the encryption is considered highly
- undesirable. In a high security situation, the process
- generating the bypassing information might be corrupted, with
- the result that information that should be controlled is
- removed from the secure network by hiding it in the bypassed
- fields of the packets.
-
- We concluded, however, that this bypass problem is not
- insurmountable. The key idea, as in all cases of bypass, is to
- limit, rather than wholly outlaw, the information passing in
- the clear. To limit the information needed for bypass, one can
- either perform the setup as a management function totally
- within the black environment, or divide the process into two
- stages. The first stage, again totally in the black context,
- defines a limited number of setup situations. The second stage
- involves sending from the red net a very small message that
- selects one request to be instantiated from among the pre-
- defined set.
-
- Perhaps the more difficult issue is the LLID in the packet
- header. If the LLID is an explicit field (as we have discussed
-
-
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- so far, but see below), it represents a new field in each
- packet, with perhaps as many as 32 bits. Again, the solution
- is to limit the way this field can be used. When the end-node
- performs a setup, it will specify the value of the LLID to be
- used. This fact can be observed by the red/black encryption
- unit, which can then limit the components of this field to the
- values currently in use. To further improve the situation, the
- encryption unit might be able to aggregate a number of flows
- onto one flow for the purpose of crossing the black net, which
- would permit a further reduction in the number of distinct
- LLIDs that must escape the red region.
-
- The details of this proposal, including some important issues
- such as the time duration of LLIDs in this case, must be
- considered further. However, the initial conclusion that
- bypass can be incorporated into a general resource control
- framework is very encouraging, since it suggests that both
- military and commercial forms of security can be built out of
- the same building blocks.
-
- 4.6.2 The Principle of Consistent Privilege
-
- A well understood principle of security is the principle of
- least privilege, which states that a system is most robust when
- it is structured to demand the least privilege from its
- components.
-
- A related rule we observe is the principle of consistent
- privilege. This can be illustrated simply in the case of
- denial of service, where it is particularly relevant. For a
- particular route, no assumption of service can be justified
- unless we trust the routers to deliver the packets. If a
- router is corrupted and will not forward packets, the only
- solution is to find another route not involving this router.
- We do not concern ourselves here with protocols for finding new
- routes in the presence of a corrupted router, since this topic
- is properly part of another topic, securing the network
- infrastructure. We only observe that either we will get
- service from the router or we will not. If the router is
- corrupted, it does not matter how it chooses to attack us.
- Thus, as long as the router is part of a forwarding path (most
- generally a multicast forwarding tree), we should not hesitate
- to trust it in other ways, such as by giving it shared resource
- keys or LLID verifiers.
-
- This illustrates the principle of consistent privilege. This
- principle is exploited in the scheme for hop-by-hop or pairwise
- use of secrets to validate LLIDs in a multicast tree. If a
-
-
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- single key is issued for the whole tree, then the privilege is
- not consistent. We only need to trust a router with respect to
- the nodes "below" it in the tree. If it fails to forward
- traffic, it can affect only those nodes. But if we give it the
- group key, then it can generate bogus traffic and inject it
- into the tree at any point, affecting traffic for other parts
- of the tree. If, on the other hand, we use pairwise keys, then
- a corrupt node can only generate bogus traffic with the key for
- traffic it would directly receive, which is the part of the
- tree it could damage anyway.
-
- Another requirement we must place on the network concerns
- routing. If a firewall is in place, we must trust the routing
- architecture not to bypass that firewall. One way to
- accomplish this is to eliminate any physical path between the
- regions other than those that go through the firewall.
- Operational experience will be required to see if this simple
- physical limit is an acceptable constraint.
-
- 4.6.3 Implicit LLID's
-
- We stress the importance of a strong conceptual distinction
- between the addresses in a packet and the LLID which is used to
- classify the packet. The conceptual distinction is important,
- but under limited circumstances it may be possible to overload
- some of the packet fields and create an LLID from the current
- packet header. For example, current packet classifiers for
- IPv4, which are not secure but which seem to work for
- classifying the packets into service classes, use a number of
- the packet fields together as a form of LLID: the source and
- destination IP addresses and ports plus the protocol type.
-
- This sort of "implicit" LLID must be short-lived, especially if
- the host can change its IP address as it moves. But if the
- LLID is established by some sort of dynamic setup protocol, it
- should be possible reestablish the LLID as needed.
-
- The current IPv4 header has no authenticator field to validate
- the LLID. An authenticator field could be optionally carried
- in an option; adding it gives robustness to network
- reservations. Any of the schemes described above for creating
- an authenticator could be used, except that if the simple
- password-style authenticator is used, it must be an explicit
- separate field, since the LLID cannot be picked randomly.
-
-
-
-
-
-
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-
- 4.6.4 Security without Setup
-
- As we describe this architecture, the setup phase is an
- essential part of the sequence. This suggests that the current
- Internet, which has no setup protocols, cannot be secured
- against denial-of-service attacks. It is important to explore
- the limits of this point. As we stressed above, setup can
- occur in many ways. Routers today offer management options to
- classify packets based on protocol types and other fields found
- in the header, and to use this classification to create a few
- fair queueing classes that can prevent one class from
- overloading the net to the exclusion of the others.
-
- There are two problem here. The first is that for a setup done
- using a management interface, the secret that is shared among
- the source and the routers to validate the LLID must remain
- valid for a long time, and it must be manually configured. The
- second problem is that the granularity of the categories may be
- coarse. However, it has been proposed, in a thesis by Radia
- Perlman, that a router might create a separate fair queueing
- class implicitly for each source address. This approach, which
- uses the addresses as an implicit LLID, must have some form of
- authenticator for robustness. But if the LLID can be trusted,
- this scheme provides classification of traffic based only on an
- implicit setup operation. The granularity of classification is
- not sufficient to provide any QOS distinction. The only
- objective is to prevent the traffic from one source from
- flooding the net to the exclusion of another.
-
- 4.6.5 Validating Addresses
-
- We make a claim here that if the LLID and the addresses in the
- packet are conceptually distinct, and if there is a suitable
- means to validate the LLID, then there is no reason to validate
- the addresses. For example, a packet constructed with a false
- source address does not seem to represent any security problem,
- if its LLID can be validated.
-
- An exception to this might possibly lie in communication with
- mobile hosts, but it will require a complete model of threats
- and requirements in the mobile environment to be sure.
- However, we make the claim, as a starting point for discussion,
- that if LLIDs are distinguished from addresses, many of the
- security concerns with mobility are mitigated and perhaps
- removed. This point should be validated by more detailed
- consideration of the mobility problem.
-
-
-
-
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-
- 4.6 Conclusions
-
- a) It is important to conceptually separate a LLID (Low-Level
- IDentifier) carried in a packet from addresses in the packet.
-
- b) There will be a single LLID carried in each packet. Although
- this might imply some additional state in the routers than if
- multiple LLIDs were used, using only one LLID choice is more
- scalable.
-
- c) Hop-by-hop LLID authentication mechanisms might provide a
- highly scalable approach that limits the distribution of
- secrets. However, the robustness limitations must be
- investigated thoroughly.
-
- d) Statistical sampling or after-the-fact detection mechanisms
- may be employed by routers to address performance concerns.
-
- 5. AN AUTHENTICATION SERVICE
-
- The purpose of an authentication service is simply to verify names,
- or more precisely to verify the origin of "messages". It differs
- from the authorization service, which determines what services are
- available to an authenticated name. We expect that authentication
- will be an Internet-wide service, while authorization will be
- specific to the resources to which access is being authorized.
-
- This "identification" function can be used in several contexts, for
- example:
-
- * One-time passwords: "it is really <huitema@inria.fr> that is
- responding to this challenge".
-
- * Access to a firewall: "it is really <huitema@inria.fr> that is
- trying to send data to host-A at port-a".
-
- There are many Internet objects that we may want to name, e.g.,:
-
- domain names: sophia.inria.fr
-
- machine names: jupiter.inria.fr
-
- service names: www.sophia.inria.fr
- (in fact, a data base)
-
- users: huitema@sophia.inria.fr
-
-
-
-
-
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-
- processes: p112.huitema@sophia.inria.fr
- p112.sophia.inria.fr
-
- universal resource locators:
- http//www.sophia.inria.fr:222/tmp/foobar
-
- One could be tempted to believe that the authentication service will
- only be concerned with naming humans, as only humans are
- "responsible"; a process obtains some access rights because it is
- acting on behalf of a person. However, this is too reductive and
- potentially misleading. We may have to authenticate "machines" or
- hardware components. For example:
-
- * When a machine boots it needs to access resources for
- configuring itself, but it is not yet "used" by a person; there
- is no user.
-
- * On a "distributed processor", component CPUs may need to
- authenticate each other.
-
- Machines do differ from users; machines cannot keep their "secrets"
- in the same way that people do. However, there is a big value in
- having a simple and extensible name space.
-
- 5.1 Names and Credentials
-
- We make the hypothesis that the authorization services will
- generally use "access control lists" (ACLs), i.e., some definition
- of a set of authorized users. A compact way to represent such a
- set would be to allow "wildcard" authorizations, e.g., "anybody at
- <Bellcore.com>", or "any machine at <INRIA.FR>". The
- authentication service should be designed to facilitate the
- realization of the authorization service and should support
- "wildcards".
-
- However, wildcards are not general enough. Assuming that we have
- a hierarchical name space, a wildcarded entry is limited to the
- naming hierarchy. For example, a name like
- <huitema@sophia.inria.fr> could be matched by the wildcard
- <*@sophia.inria.fr> or <*.inria.fr> or <*.fr>. This is useful as
- long as one stays at INRIA, but does not solve the generic
- problem. Suppose that an IETF file server at CNRI is to be
- accessible by all IAB members: its ACL will explicitly list the
- members by name.
-
- The classic approach to naming, as exemplified in the X.500 model,
- is to consider that people have "distinguished names". Once one
- has discovered such a name through some "white pages" service, can
-
-
-
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- use it as an access key in a global directory service.
-
- An individual may acquire authorizations from a variety of
- sources. Using a pure, identity-based access control system, the
- user would have to acquire multiple identities (i.e.,
- distinguished names), corresponding to the roles in which she is
- authorized to access different services. We discuss this approach
- in the next section.
-
- An alternative approach is for the user to have a very small
- number of identities, and to have the grantors of authorizations
- issue (signed) credentials granting permissions to the user,
- linked to her ID. These additional signed credentials are known
- as "capabilities". The user can then establish her identity
- through a generic identity credential, e.g., an X.509 certificate,
- and can establish authorization by presenting capabilities as
- required. This is somewhat analogous to a person acquiring credit
- cards linked to the name on a driver's license, and presenting the
- appropriate credit card, plus the license for picture verification
- of identity.
-
- 5.2 Identity-Based Authorization
-
- Let's open the wallet of an average person: we find several
- "credit cards" in it. We all have many "credit cards", e.g.,
- company cards, credit cards, airline frequent flyers memberships,
- driver licenses. Each of these cards is in fact a token asserting
- the existence of a relation: the bank certifies that checks
- presented by the bearer will be paid, the traffic authorities
- certifies that the bearer has learned how to drive, etc. This is
- an example of identity-based authorization, in which an individual
- is given different names corresponding to different relations
- entered into by that individual.
-
- If we imagine that the name space is based upon DNS (domain)
- names, then for example, the person mentioned above could be
- authenticated with the names:
-
- customer@my-big-bank.com
-
- customer@frequent-flyer.airline.com
-
- The model we used here is that "the name is an association". This
- is consistent with name verification procedures, in which that one
- builds a "chain of trust" between the user and the "resource
- agent". By following a particular path in the trust graph, one
- can both establish the trust and show that the user belongs to an
- "authorized group".
-
-
-
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-
- The existence of "multiple names" for a person may or may not
- imply the existence of an "equivalence" relation. It may be
- useful to know that <huitema@sophia.inria.fr> and
- <huitema@iab.isoc.org> are two names for the same person, but
- there are many cases where the user does not want to make all his
- tokens visible.
-
- 5.3 Choosing Credentials
-
- Let's consider again the example of Christian Huitema accessing a
- file at CNRI. He will have to interact with INRIA's outgoing
- firewall and with CNRI's incoming controls. Regardless of whether
- authorization depends upon capabilities or upon multiple
- association names, a different credential may be needed in each
- firewall on the path. For example, assuming multiple names are
- used, he will use an INRIA name, <huitema@sophia.inria.fr>, to be
- authorized by INRIA to use network resources, and he will use an
- IAB name, <huitema@iab.isoc.org>, to access the file server. Thus
- comes an obvious problem: how does he choose the credential
- appropriate to a particular firewall? More precisely, how does
- the computer program that manages the connection discover that it
- should use one credential in response to INRIA's firewall
- challenge and another in response to CNRI's request?
-
- There are many possible answers. The program could simply pass
- all the user's credentials and let the remote machine pick one.
- This works, but poses some efficiency problems: passing all
- possible names is bulky, looking through many names is long.
- Advertising many names is also very undesirable for privacy and
- security reasons: one does not want remote servers to collect
- statistics on all the credentials that a particular user may have.
-
- Another possibility is to let the agent that requests an
- authorization pass the set of credentials that it is willing to
- accept, e.g., "I am ready to serve CNRI employees and IAB
- members". This poses the same privacy and security problems as
- the previous solutions, although to a lesser degree. In fact, the
- problem of choosing a name is the same as the generic "trust path"
- model. The name to choose is merely a path in the authentication
- graph, and network specialists are expected to know how to find
- paths in graphs.
-
- In the short term, it is probably possible to use a "default name"
- or "principal name", at least for local transactions, and to count
- on the user to "guess" the credential that is required by remote
- services. To leave the local environment we need only the local
- credentials; to contact a remote server we need only the
- destination credentials. So we need one or maybe two credentials,
-
-
-
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- which may be derived from the destination. It will be very often
- the case that the generic credential is enough; then wildcards;
- then "FTP provided" tokens.
-
- 6. OTHER ISSUES
-
- 6.1 Privacy and Authentication of Multicast Groups
-
- Multicast applications are becoming an increasingly important part
- of Internet communications. Packet voice, video and shared
- whiteboard can be powerful productivity tools for users. For
- these applications to have maximum value to their users, a variety
- of security services will be required.
-
- Existing techniques are directly applicable to providing privacy
- for a private teleconference. If each member of the conference
- shares a single key for a symmetric encryption algorithm (such as
- DES), existing point-to-point security techniques can be extended
- to protect communication within the group from outsiders.
-
- However, slight modifications to existing techniques are required
- to accommodate the multicast environment. Each packet will
- require independent cryptographic processing to ensure that
- packets from multiple sources can be independently decrypted by
- the numerous receivers, particularly in the presence of lost
- packets. N-party authentication and key management will be
- required to establish the shared key among the proper group
- members. This can be done by extending existing two-party key
- management techniques pairwise. For example, the conference
- manager may provide the key to each member following individual
- authentication; for example, this could be implemented trivially
- using PEM technology. The overhead experienced by each host
- computer in the conference will be similar to that of existing
- point-to-point encryption applications, This overhead is be low
- enough that, today, software encryption can offer adequate
- performance to secure whiteboard and voice traffic, while hardware
- encryption is adequate for video.
-
- The nature of multicast communication adds an additional
- requirement. Existing multicast conferences provide gradual
- degradation in quality as the packet loss rate increases. To be
- acceptable, authentication protocols must tolerate lost packets.
- Techniques to accomplish this efficiently need to be developed.
- One initial sketch is outlined below. Engineering work will be
- required to validate the practicality of this approach.
-
-
-
-
-
-
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-
- The use of symmetric encryption provides the members of the
- conference with effective protection from outsiders. However,
- because all members of the conference share a single key, it does
- not provide a means of authenticating individual conference
- members. In principle, existing techniques, based on one-way hash
- functions coupled with digital signatures based on asymmetric
- encryption algorithms, can provide individual authentication.
- One-way hash functions such as MD5 are comparable in cost to
- symmetric encryption. However, digital signatures are
- considerably more costly, both in computation and in communication
- size. The degree of overhead depends on the quality of
- authentication required.
-
- In summary, realtime authentication at the granularity of group
- membership is easy and cheap, but individual authentication is
- costly in time and space. Over time, the costs of both
- communications and processing are expected to decline. It is
- possible that this will help make authentication at the level of
- individual conference participants. There are two conflicting
- trends: (1) increasing CPU speeds to provide symmetric
- encryption, and (2) increasing communication data rates. If both
- technologies increase proportionally, there will be no net gain,
- at least if the grain size is measured in terms of bits, rather
- than as a period in seconds.
-
- The group felt that the correct approach to end-to-end controls is
- the use of encryption, as discussed above. The alternative is to
- control the ability of a user to join a multicast group as a
- listener, or as a speaker. However, we are not comfortable with
- the level of assurance that we can offer if we attempt to ensure
- end-to-end semantics using these means. Any passive penetration
- of the network, i.e., any wire-tap, can compromise the privacy of
- the transmitted information. We must acknowledge, however, that
- problems with deployment of encryption code and hardware, and
- especially problems of export controls, will create a pressure to
- use the tools described in Section 4 to implement a form of end-
- to-end control. Such a decision would raise no new issues in
- security technology. The shared key now used for encrypting the
- data could instead be used as the basis for authenticating a
- multicast group join request. This would require modification of
- the multicast packet format, but nothing more. Our concern is not
- the technical difficulty of this approach, but the level of
- assurance we can offer the user.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
- Braden, Clark, Crocker & Huitema [Page 40]
-
- RFC 1636 IAB Workshop Report June 1994
-
-
- 6.2 Secure Plug-and-Play a Must
-
- Plug-and-play is the ability to plug a new device into a network
- and have it obtain the information it needs to communicate with
- other devices, without requiring any new configuration
- information. Secure plug-and-play is an important Internet
- requirement, and a central architectural issue is whether it can
- be made to scale well.
-
- For plug-and-play operation, a new machine that is "plugged" into
- the network needs to:
-
- (1) Obtain an locator so it can communicate with other devices
-
- (2) Register or obtain a name to be identified by (e.g., machine
- name)
-
- (3) Discover services available on the network (e.g., printers,
- routers, file servers, etc.)
-
- (4) Discover other systems on the network so it can communicate
- with them.
-
- In some environments, no security mechanisms are required because
- physical security and local knowledge of the users are sufficient
- protection. At the other end of the spectrum is a large network
- with many groups of users, different types of outside connections,
- and levels of administrative control. In such environments,
- similar plug-and-play capabilities are needed, but the new device
- must be "authenticated" before it can perform these functions. In
- each step in the discovery process the new device must
- authenticate itself prior to learning about services.
-
- The steps might be:
-
- - Obtain a HLID from a smart card, smart disk, or similar
- device.
-
- - Authenticate itself with the first plug-and-play server using
- its HLID, to register a name and to find the location of
- other services.
-
- - Discover services available on the network (e.g., printers,
- routers, file servers, etc.) based on its HLID.
-
- - Discover other systems on the network so it can communicate
- with them.
-
-
-
-
- Braden, Clark, Crocker & Huitema [Page 41]
-
- RFC 1636 IAB Workshop Report June 1994
-
-
- The problem of taking a system out of the box and initially
- configuring it is similar to the problem of a mobile or portable
- machine that a human wants to connect to a local network
- temporarily in order to receive services on that network. How can
- the local network authenticate the human (and therefore the
- human's machine) and know which services this visiting machine is
- permitted to use?
-
- The human must be endowed with a high level identifier (HLID)
- which acts as his/her passport and can be verified by the local
- network. This high level identifier must be globally unique and
- registered/assigned by some recognized authority.
-
- When the human plugs the machine onto a local net, the machine
- identifies itself to the net with the human's high level
- identifier. If local net has a policy of permitting anyone to
- plug and play on its network, it will ignore the HLID and assign
- an address (locator), permitting the visitor unrestricted access
- and privileges. More likely, the local net will authenticate the
- HLID prior to granting the visitor an address or any privileges.
-
- At this point, the HLID has only authenticated the visitor to the
- local network; the issue of which services or resources the
- visitor is entitled to use has not been addressed. It is
- desirable to develop a low-overhead approach to granting
- authentications to new users. This will help in the case of
- visitors to a site, as well as new users joining a facility.
-
- 6.3 A Short-Term Confidentiality Mechanism
-
- Authentication has customarily been achieved using passwords. In
- the absence of active attacks, the greatest threat to computer
- system security may be the ease with which passwords can be
- "snooped" by the promiscuous monitoring of shared-media networks.
- There are known security techniques for achieving authentication
- without exposing passwords to interception, for example the
- techniques implemented in the well-known Kerberos system.
- However, authentication systems such as Kerberos currently operate
- only in isolation within organizational boundaries. Developing
- and deploying a global authentication infrastructure is an
- important objective, but it will take some years. Another useful
- approach in the short term is the use of a challenge-response user
- authentication scheme (e.g., S/Key).
-
- One of the groups explored another interim approach to guarding
- passwords: introducing a readily-used confidentiality mechanism
- based on an encrypted TCP connection. This would operate at the
- IP level to encrypt the IP payload, including the TCP header, to
-
-
-
- Braden, Clark, Crocker & Huitema [Page 42]
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- RFC 1636 IAB Workshop Report June 1994
-
-
- allow the nature as well of the contents of the communication to
- be kept private. It could be implemented to provide either
- "strict" protection (the connection fails if the other side cannot
- decrypt your data stream) or "loose" protection (falling back to
- non-private TCP if decryption fails).
-
- Loose protection would allow interoperability with older hosts in
- a seamless (non-user-intrusive) manner.
-
- One-time keys may be exchanged during the SYN handshake that
- starts the TCP connection. Using one-time keys avoids a need for
- infrastructure support and does not require trust between the
- organizations on the two ends of the connection. Tieing the key
- exchange to the SYN handshake will avoid the possibility of having
- the connection fully open without knowing the state of encryption
- on both ends of the connection. Although it may still be
- theoretically possible to intercept the SYN exchange and subvert
- the connection by an active "man-in-the-middle" attack, in
- practice such attacks on TCP connections are quite difficult
- unless the routing protocols have been subverted.
-
- The keys could be exchanged using a new option that specifies the
- key exchange protocol, the data encryption algorithm, and the key
- to be used to decrypt the connection. It could be possible to
- include multiple options in the same SYN segment, specifying
- different encryption models; the far end would then need to
- acknowledge the option that it is willing to use. In this case,
- the lack of an acknowledgement would imply disinterest in
- decrypting the datastream. If a loose privacy policy were in
- force, the connection could continue even without an
- acknowledgment. The policy, "strict" or "loose", would be set by
- either the user or the default configuration for the machine.
-
- One must however observe that a TCP option can carry only a
- limited amount of data. Efficient protection against crypto-
- analysis of the Diffie-Hellmann scheme may require the use of a
- very long modulus, e.g., 1024 bits, which cannot be carried in the
- 40 bytes available for TCP options. One would thus have either to
- define an "extended option" format or to implement encryption in a
- separate protocol layered between TCP and IP, perhaps using a
- version of "IP security". The detailed engineering of such a
- solution would have to be studied by a working group.
-
- A TCP connection encryption mechanism such as that just outlined
- requires no application changes, although it does require kernel
- changes. It has important drawbacks, including failure to provide
- privacy for privacy for UDP, and the great likelihood of export
- control restrictions. If Diffie-Hellman were used, there would
-
-
-
- Braden, Clark, Crocker & Huitema [Page 43]
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- RFC 1636 IAB Workshop Report June 1994
-
-
- also be patent issues.
-
- 7. CONCLUSIONS
-
- As a practical matter, security must be added to the Internet
- incrementally. For example, a scheme that requires, as a
- precondition for any improvement, changes to application code, the
- DNS, routers and firewalls all at once will be very hard to deploy.
- One of the reasons the workshop explored schemes that are local to
- the IP layer is that we surmise that they might be easier to deploy
- in practice.
-
- There are two competing observations that must shape planning for
- Internet security. One is the well known expression: "the best is
- the enemy of the good." The other is the observation that the
- attacks are getting better.
-
- Finally, it should noted that the principle of least privilege, which
- was mentioned above, may be in contradiction to the principle of
- least cost.
-
- 7.1 Suggested Short-Term Actions
-
- The general recommendation for short-term Internet security policy
- was that the IETF should make a list of desirable short-term
- actions and then reach out to work with other organizations to
- carry them out. Other organizations include regionals, which may
- be in a good position to provide site security counseling services
- to their customers, vendors and other providers, and other
- societies. We should also give input to the US government to
- influence their posture on security in the direction desired by
- the community.
-
- A suggested preliminary list of short-term actions was developed.
-
- o Perform external diagnostic security probes
-
- Organizations should be encouraged to use CRACK and other
- tools to check the robustness of their own passwords. It
- would also be useful to run a variety of security probes from
- outside. Since this is a very sensitive issue, some care
- needs to be taken to get the proper auspices for such
- probing.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
- Braden, Clark, Crocker & Huitema [Page 44]
-
- RFC 1636 IAB Workshop Report June 1994
-
-
- Useful probe tools include:
-
- ISS: Klaus (GA)
- SATAN: Farmer Venema
- ICEPICK: NRL
-
- o Determine Security-Risk Publication Channels
-
- What channels should be used for disseminating information of
- security risks?
-
- o Encourage use of one-time passwords.
-
- Available packages: S/Key, SecurID, Enigma, Digital Pathways.
-
- o Develop and publish guidelines for protocol developers, for
- security-friendliness and firewall-friendliness.
-
- o Control topology to isolate threats
-
- o Set privacy policy:
-
- * Always
-
- * As much as possible
-
- o Bring Site Security Handbook up to date
-
- o Support use of Kerberos
-
- The subject of the "Clipper chip" came up several times, but there
- was not sufficient discussion of this very complex issue for this
- grouip to reach a recommendation. It has been observed that there
- are a number of quite differing viewpoints about Clipper.
-
- o Some people accept the government's Clipper proposal,
- including key escrow by the US government and the
- requirement that encryption be in hardware.
-
- o Some people don't mind key escrow by the government in
- principle, but the object to the hardware requirement.
-
- o Some people don't mind key escrow in principle, but
- don't want the government to hold the keys. They would
- be comfortable with having the organization which owns
- the data hold the keys.
-
- o Some people don't want key escrow at all.
-
-
-
- Braden, Clark, Crocker & Huitema [Page 45]
-
- RFC 1636 IAB Workshop Report June 1994
-
-
- o Some people don't mind the hardware or the key escrow,
- but they don't think this will be acceptable to other
- countries and thus will not work internationally.
-
- This report takes no position on any of these viewpoints.
-
- 7.2 Suggested Medium-Term Actions
-
- These actions require some protocol design or modification;
- however, they use existing security technology and require no
- research.
-
- o Authentication Protocol
-
- There is a problem of the choice of technology. Public key
- technology is generally deemed superior, but it is patented
- and can also induce relatively long computations. Symmetric
- key technology (Needham-Schroeder algorithm, as used in
- Kerberos) has some technical drawbacks but it is not
- patented. A system based on symmetric keys and used only for
- authentication would be freely exportable without being
- subject to patents.
-
- o Push Kerberos
-
- Engineering is needed on Kerberos to allow it to interoperate
- with mechanisms that use public key cryptography.
-
- o Push PEM/RIPEM/PGP...
-
- o Develop an authenticated DNS
-
- o Develop a key management mechanism
-
- o Set up a certificate server infrastructure
-
- Possible server mechanisms include the DNS, Finger, SNMP,
- Email, Web, and FTP.
-
- o Engineer authentication for the Web
-
-
- 7.3 Suggested Long-Term Actions
-
- In this category, we have situations where a threat has been
- identified and solutions are imaginable, but closure has not been
- reached on the principles.
-
-
-
-
- Braden, Clark, Crocker & Huitema [Page 46]
-
- RFC 1636 IAB Workshop Report June 1994
-
-
- o Executable Apps
-
- o Router sabotage counter-measures
-
- o Prevent Byzantine routing.
-
- o Proxy Computing
-
- o Decomposition of computers
-
- o Are there "good" viruses?
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
- Braden, Clark, Crocker & Huitema [Page 47]
-
- RFC 1636 IAB Workshop Report June 1994
-
-
- APPENDIX A -- Workshop Organization
-
- The following list of attendees indicates also the breakout group to
- which they were assigned.
-
- Breakout Groups
-
- Group I.1 Leader:
- 1 Christian Huitema, INRIA (IAB)
-
- 1 Steve Bellovin, AT&T
- 1 Bob Braden, ISI (IAB)
- 1 John Curran, NEARNET
- 1 Phill Gross, ANS (IETF/IAB)
- 1 Stev Knowles, FTP Software (Internet AD)
- 1 Barry Leiner, USRA (IAB)
- 1 Paul Mockapetris, ISI
- 1 Yakov Rekhter, IBM (IAB)
- 1 Dave Sincoskie, Bellcore (IAB)
-
- Group I.2 Leader:
- 2 Steve Crocker, TIS (Security AD)
-
- 2 Jon Crowcroft
- 2 Steve Deering, PARC
- 2 Paul Francis, NTT
- 2 Van Jacobson, LBL
- 2 Phil Karn, Qualcomm
- 2 Allison Mankin, NRL (Transport AD, IPng AD)
- 2 Radia Perlman, Novell
- 2 John Romkey, ELF (IAB)
- 2 Mike StJohns, ARPA (IAB)
-
- Group I.3 Leader:
- 3 Dave Clark, MIT
-
- 3 Deborah Estrin, USC
- 3 Elise Gerich, Merit (IAB)
- 3 Steve Kent, BBN (IAB)
- 3 Tony Lauck, DEC (IAB)
- 3 Tony Li, CISCO
- 3 Bob Hinden, Sun (IESG->IAB liaison, Routing AD)
- 3 Jun Murai, WIDE (IAB)
- 3 Scott Shenker, PARC
- 3 Abel Weinrib, Bellcore
-
- The following were able to attend only the third day, due to a
- conflicting ISOC Board of Trustees meeting:
-
-
-
- Braden, Clark, Crocker & Huitema [Page 48]
-
- RFC 1636 IAB Workshop Report June 1994
-
-
- Scott Bradner, Harvard (IPng AD)
- Jon Postel, ISI (IAB)
-
- The workshop agenda was as follows.
-
- Tues Feb 8
- 9:00 - 10:30 Plenary
- Discuss facilities, meeting goals, agenda, organization.
- Establish some minimal common understandings. Assign
- scenarios to Breakout I groups.
-
- 10:30 - 13:00 Breakout I meetings
- Each breakout group examine one or more scenarios and
- formulate a list of design questions. Lunch available on
- 11th floor.
-
- 13:00 - 15:00 Plenary
- Report, discuss. Collate and shorten list of design
- issues. Organize Breakout II groups to work on these
- issues.
-
- 15:00 - 17:30 Breakout IIa meetings
- Work on design issues.
-
- Wed Feb 9
- 9:00 - 10:00 Plenary
- Report, discuss.
-
- 10:00 - 13:30 Breakout IIb meetings
- More work on design questions, develop list of
- requirements.
-
- 13:30 - 14:30 Plenary
- Report, discuss.
-
- 15:30 - 17:30 Breakout III groups
-
- Thurs Feb 10
- 9:00 - 9:30 Plenary
-
- 9:30 - 11:00 Breakout Groups (wrapup)
-
- 11:00 - 12:00 Plenary
- Discuss possible short-term security recommendations
-
- 13:00 - 14:00 Plenary -- Discuss short-term security issues
-
- 14:00 - 14:30 Plenary -- Presentation by Steve Bellovin
-
-
-
- Braden, Clark, Crocker & Huitema [Page 49]
-
- RFC 1636 IAB Workshop Report June 1994
-
-
- 14:30 - 16:00 Plenary -- Long- and Medium-term
- Recommendations
-
- The following scenarios were used as a starting point for
- discussions. It distinguished security-S (security as a service to
- the end systems) from security-M, security as a mechanism to support
- other services. The workshop was intended to be primarily concerned
- with interactions among the following different *services*:
-
- o Security-S
-
- o Routing
-
- o Multi-destination delivery (mcast-S)
-
- o Realtime Packet scheduling (realtime)
-
- o Mobility
-
- o Accounting
-
- (and maybe large-scale?)
-
- These categories were then applied to the following scenarios:
-
- S1. Support a private teleconference among mobile hosts connected to
- the Internet. [Security-S, mcast-S, realtime, mobility]
-
- S2. The group in S1 is 1/3 the Internet, i.e., there are VERY severe
- scaling problems. [Security-S, mcast-S, realtime, mobility,
- large-scale]
-
- S3. Charge for communication to support a video teleconference.
- [Accounting, realtime, mcast-S]
-
- S4. I am travelling with my laptop. I tune in to radio channel IP-
- RADIO, pick-up the beacon and start using it. Who gets the
- bill? Why do they believe this is me? Is "me" a piece of
- hardware (IP address) or a certified user (PEM certificate)?
- [Mobility, accounting (, realtime, mcast-S)]
-
- S5. A Politically Important Person will mcast an Internet
- presentation, without danger of interruptions from the audience.
-
- S6. The travel industry wants to use Internet to deliver tickets to
- customer premises directly in a secure way, but the customer has
- only dial-up capability. [Security-S, mobility]
-
-
-
-
- Braden, Clark, Crocker & Huitema [Page 50]
-
- RFC 1636 IAB Workshop Report June 1994
-
-
- S7. I am traveling with my laptop and this friendly host is running
- the autoconfiguration protocol. I immediately get an address as
- "mac1.friendly.host.com". (What is the difference between my
- laptop and a bona fide autoconfigured local station?)
- [Security-S, mobility]
-
- S8. Multiple people are connected to a subnetwork providing mobility
- (e.g., cellular, packet radio). The subnetwork is connected to
- multiple places in the "fixed" backbone. How can routing be done
- efficiently? [Routing, mobility]
-
- The following scenarios that were suggested do not fit into the
- primary thrust of the workshop, generally because they are single-
- issue topics. Most of them are pure security topics and are
- concerned with the security perimeter. The last two do not fit into
- our classification system at all.
-
- S9. XYZ corporation has two major branches on opposite ends of the
- world, and they want to communicate securely over the Internet,
- with each branch having IP-level connectivity to the other (not
- through application gateways).
-
- S10. I am visiting XYZ corporation, with my laptop. I want to
- connect it to their LAN to read my email remotely over the
- Internet. Even though I am inside their corporate firewall,
- they want to be protect their machines from me.
-
- S11. XYZ corporation is trying to use the Internet to support both
- private and public networking. It wants to provide full
- connectivity internally between all of its resources, and to
- provide public access to certain resources (analogous of
- anonymous ftp servers)
-
- S12. The travel industry wants to use Internet to deliver tickets to
- customer premises directly in a secure way.
-
- S13. Some hacker is deliberately subverting routing protocols,
- including mobile and multicast routing. Design counter
- measures.
-
- S14. Part of the Internet is running IPv4 and part is running IPng
- (i.e. the Internet is in transition). How can we assure
- continued secure operation through such a transition?
-
- S15. A corporation uses ATM to connect a number of its sites. It also
- uses Internet. It wants to make use of the ATM as its primary
- carrier, but also wants to utilize other networking technologies
- as appropriate (e.g., mobile radio). It wants to support all
-
-
-
- Braden, Clark, Crocker & Huitema [Page 51]
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- RFC 1636 IAB Workshop Report June 1994
-
-
- media (data, voice, video).
-
-
- Security Considerations
-
- This memo is entirely concerned with security issues.
-
- Authors' Addresses
-
- Bob Braden [Editor]
- USC Information Sciences Institute
- 4676 Admiralty Way
- Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6695
-
- Phone: (310) 822-1511
- EMail: Braden@ISI.EDU
-
-
- David Clark
- MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
- 545 Technology Square
- Cambridge, MA 02139-1986
-
- Phone: 617-253-6003
- EMail: ddc@lcs.mit.edu
-
-
- Steve Crocker
- Trusted Information Systems, Inc.
- 3060 Washington Road (Rte 97)
- Glenwood, MD 21738
-
- Phone: (301) 854-6889
- EMail: crocker@tis.com
-
-
- Christian Huitema
- INRIA, Sophia-Antipolis
- 2004 Route des Lucioles
- BP 109
- F-06561 Valbonne Cedex
- France
-
- Phone: +33 93 65 77 15
- EMail: Christian.Huitema@MIRSA.INRIA.FR
-
-
-
-
-
-
- Braden, Clark, Crocker & Huitema [Page 52]
-
-