Internet DRAFT - draft-bishop-httpbis-origin-fed-up
draft-bishop-httpbis-origin-fed-up
HTTPbis M. Bishop
Internet-Draft E. Nygren
Updates: 8336 (if approved) Akamai
Intended status: Standards Track January 8, 2019
Expires: July 12, 2019
DNS Security with HTTP/2 ORIGIN
draft-bishop-httpbis-origin-fed-up-00
Abstract
The definition of the HTTP/2 ORIGIN frame "relaxes" the requirement
to check DNS for various reasons. However, experience has shown that
such relaxation leads to security risks and is inadvisable. This
document restores the original requirements.
Status of This Memo
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provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
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This Internet-Draft will expire on July 12, 2019.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. Some Alternative Means . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.1. Certificate Transparency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.2. OCSP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3. Balancing Concerns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.1. Improving Privacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.2. Limiting Scope of Certificate Compromise . . . . . . . . 5
3.3. Updates to RFC 8336 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
5. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
6. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
6.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
6.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1. Introduction
[ORIGIN] describes a method whereby an HTTP/2 server can enumerate
the HTTP origins for which it purports to be authoritative. This set
can be greater or lesser than the set of origins over which the
client might originally have considered the server to be
authoritative. Of course, the client will generally not send
requests to a server unless it considers the server to be
authoritative for that origin.
Section 2.4 of [ORIGIN] states that:
...clients "MAY avoid consulting DNS to establish the connection's
authority for new requests to origins in the Origin Set; however,
those that do so face new risks, as explained in Section 4.
In Section 4 of [ORIGIN], the attacks this enables are described,
along with the note that "Clients that blindly trust the ORIGIN
frame's contents will be vulnerable to a large number of attacks.
See Section 2.4 for mitigations."
The mitigation recommended in Section 2.4 is to require the use of
TLS and that the certificate presented be authoritative for the
origin in question; the latter is a requirement already present in
[HTTP2] for HTTP/2 connections using TLS. In Section 4, it is
further recommended that:
...clients opting not to consult DNS ought to employ some
alternative means to establish a high degree of confidence that
the certificate is legitimate.
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Several methods of increasing certificate trust are referenced.
However, during the discussion of [SecondaryCerts], the ability to
perform attacks using a misissued or compromised certificate has been
a concern. These attacks are fundamentally enabled by the relaxation
of the requirement to verify DNS ownership, and ongoing community
concern about these attacks demonstrates that there is no longer
consensus that these checks do not serve a purpose.
2. Some Alternative Means
[ORIGIN] leaves open-ended the decision of when to consider the
certificate alone sufficient to trust a server's claim of authority
over an origin. However, it enumerates some possibilities:
For example, clients might skip consulting DNS only if they
receive proof of inclusion in a Certificate Transparency log
[RFC6962] or if they have a recent Online Certificate Status
Protocol (OCSP) response [RFC6960] (possibly using the
"status_request" TLS extension [RFC6066]) showing that the
certificate was not revoked.
These mitigations are assuredly helpful in assuring general
certificate validity, but they fail to fully prevent attacks from
misissued or compromised certificates. In particular, a certificate
which is fraudulently obtained or compromised can remain usable by an
attacker for nearly two weeks.
2.1. Certificate Transparency
Certificate Transparency [RFC6962] defines an experimental protocol
for publicly logging the existence of Transport Layer Security (TLS)
certificates as they are issued or observed, in a manner that allows
anyone to audit certificate authority (CA) activity and notice the
issuance of suspect certificates as well as to audit the certificate
logs themselves.
The expectation is that domain owners (or agents acting on their
behalf) would actively monitor such logs for domains they control,
verify that any newly-issued certificates are in fact legitimate, and
have the certificate revoked if not.
This does significantly reduce the odds of a misissued certificate
having a long usable lifetime. However, it does not reduce that
lifetime to zero. A Signed Certificate Timestamp is not proof of
inclusion in a Certificate Transparency log - it is a promise to
include a certificate in a future log. Verification of certificate
inclusion requires having a Signed Tree Head from that CT log which
is newer than the SCT by at least that log's "maximum merge delay."
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[CertificateTransparency] A misissued certificate remains invisible
to inspecting parties for up to this period of time, plus whatever
time is required to detect the certificate after inclusion. The
"maximum merge delay" of most CT logs is twenty-four hours. (See
[GoogleTrustedCT], [AppleTrustedCT].)
2.2. OCSP
Revocation checking has been a known challenge for TLS clients, with
OCSP Stapling emerging as the solution of choice. While an OCSP
endpoint can often be blocked by an attacker or otherwise be
unavailable, the "status_request" TLS extension [RFC6066] can enable
a client to request and the server to provide a recent OCSP response
as part of the TLS handshake. This assists in verifying the non-
revoked state of the certificate without creating a single point of
failure.
However, the timeline for a revoked certificate still permits a
surprising period of exercise, as described in [CABForum]:
o CAs have up to 24 hours to revoke a compromised certificate after
notification; longer for other reasons
o Certificate Revocation Lists and OCSP responses have a maximum
validity period of ten days
This means that an attacker-held certificate remains potentially
valid for use by an attacker for as long as eleven days following the
discovery of a compromise or misissuance, plus any amount of time
required to discover the situation.
Additionally, the fact that a certificate has not been revoked is not
proof that the issuer was permitted to issue it in the first place.
An attacker-controlled CA could be used to hijack any site and could
return a fully normal OCSP response. This indicates that OCSP
without a publicly-auditable CT entry does not provide sufficient
proof, especially when private CAs are trusted by the user agent.
3. Balancing Concerns
The primary reasons for avoiding the DNS resolution were two-fold.
First and more simply, there is a latency cost to performing DNS
resolutions, and this permits clients to minimize latency before
issuing requests.
Second and more serious is the fact that DNS is typically performed
over clear-text. In addition to the origin itself, other parties
learn that the client is interested in contacting the origin:
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o The DNS server operator
o The client's Internet Service Provider
o Other clients which can observe local network traffic
By avoiding a DNS resolution for an origin, clients can avoid these
parties gaining additional information. However, as described in
this draft, doing so exposes clients to different security concerns.
3.1. Improving Privacy
Given recent developments such as DNS over TLS [DoT] and DNS over
HTTPS [DoH], there are now alternative means to avoid disclosure of a
client's DNS activities to anyone other than the DNS server operator.
[DoT] or [DoH] can be used for DNS resolution when available in order
to limit unnecessary disclosure of a client's DNS activity to third
parties.
3.2. Limiting Scope of Certificate Compromise
In order to successfully use a fraudulent certificate, an attacker
needs one of the following situations to occur:
o The attacker controls the client's DNS resolution and can provide
its own IP address as that of the victim domain.
o The attacker controls the path between the client and the victim
domain's real address, and can hijack a TCP connection intended
for the victim domain's server
o The client supports [ORIGIN], the fraudulent certificate contains
both the victim domain and an attacker-controlled domain, and the
attacker can induce the client to access an attacker-owned domain
o The client supports both [ORIGIN] and [SecondaryCerts], and the
attacker can induce the client to access an attacker-owned domain
Following the DNS verifications in [HTTP2], only the first two
situations will result in the client considering the attacker
authoritative for the victim domain. However, if the client relaxes
DNS checks as specified in [ORIGIN], the latter two attack
configurations become possible as well.
As a result, DNS resolution MUST continue to be performed prior to
accepting a server as valid for an HTTP origin.
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3.3. Updates to RFC 8336
[ORIGIN] is modified as follows:
o The fifth paragraph of Section 2.4 is deleted
o The first three paragraphs of Section 4 are replaced with the
contents of Section 4 from this document
o The informative reference to [AltSvc] (Section 5.2) is made a
normative reference (in Section 5.1)
4. Security Considerations
Clients that blindly trust the ORIGIN frame's contents will be
vulnerable to a large number of attacks.
Omitting the requirement to consult DNS when determining authority
for an origin would mean that an attacker who possesses a valid
certificate no longer needs to be on path to redirect traffic to
them; instead of modifying DNS, they need only convince the user to
visit another website in order to coalesce connections to the target
onto their existing connection.
Before considering a server to be authoritative for any given origin,
clients MUST validate that the destination IP address is valid for
the origin either by direct DNS resolution or resolution of a
validated Alternative Service [AltSvc].
5. IANA Considerations
This document has no actions for IANA.
6. References
6.1. Normative References
[AltSvc] Nottingham, M., McManus, P., and J. Reschke, "HTTP
Alternative Services", RFC 7838, DOI 10.17487/RFC7838,
April 2016, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7838>.
[DoH] Hoffman, P. and P. McManus, "DNS Queries over HTTPS
(DoH)", RFC 8484, DOI 10.17487/RFC8484, October 2018,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8484>.
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[DoT] Hu, Z., Zhu, L., Heidemann, J., Mankin, A., Wessels, D.,
and P. Hoffman, "Specification for DNS over Transport
Layer Security (TLS)", RFC 7858, DOI 10.17487/RFC7858, May
2016, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7858>.
[HTTP2] Belshe, M., Peon, R., and M. Thomson, Ed., "Hypertext
Transfer Protocol Version 2 (HTTP/2)", RFC 7540,
DOI 10.17487/RFC7540, May 2015,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7540>.
[ORIGIN] Nottingham, M. and E. Nygren, "The ORIGIN HTTP/2 Frame",
RFC 8336, DOI 10.17487/RFC8336, March 2018,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8336>.
6.2. Informative References
[AppleTrustedCT]
"Certificate Transparency Policy", n.d.,
<https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205280>.
[CABForum]
CA/Browser Forum, "Baseline Requirements for the Issuance
and Management of Publicly-Trusted Certificates", n.d.,
<https://cabforum.org/wp-content/uploads/
CA-Browser-Forum-BR-1.6.1.pdf>.
[CertificateTransparency]
"Certificate Transparency: Getting Started", n.d.,
<http://www.certificate-transparency.org/getting-started>.
[GoogleTrustedCT]
"List of Trusted CT Logs", n.d.,
<https://www.gstatic.com/ct/log_list/log_list.json>.
[RFC6066] Eastlake 3rd, D., "Transport Layer Security (TLS)
Extensions: Extension Definitions", RFC 6066,
DOI 10.17487/RFC6066, January 2011,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6066>.
[RFC6960] Santesson, S., Myers, M., Ankney, R., Malpani, A.,
Galperin, S., and C. Adams, "X.509 Internet Public Key
Infrastructure Online Certificate Status Protocol - OCSP",
RFC 6960, DOI 10.17487/RFC6960, June 2013,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6960>.
[RFC6962] Laurie, B., Langley, A., and E. Kasper, "Certificate
Transparency", RFC 6962, DOI 10.17487/RFC6962, June 2013,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6962>.
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[SecondaryCerts]
Bishop, M., Sullivan, N., and M. Thomson, "Secondary
Certificate Authentication in HTTP/2", draft-ietf-httpbis-
http2-secondary-certs-03 (work in progress), October 2018.
Authors' Addresses
Mike Bishop
Akamai
Email: mbishop@evequefou.be
Erik Nygren
Akamai
Email: erik+ietf@nygren.org
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