Internet DRAFT - draft-ietf-tls-cert-abridge

draft-ietf-tls-cert-abridge







Transport Layer Security                                      D. Jackson
Internet-Draft                                                   Mozilla
Intended status: Experimental                           6 September 2023
Expires: 9 March 2024


              Abridged Compression for WebPKI Certificates
                     draft-ietf-tls-cert-abridge-00

Abstract

   This draft defines a new TLS Certificate Compression scheme which
   uses a shared dictionary of root and intermediate WebPKI
   certificates.  The scheme smooths the transition to post-quantum
   certificates by eliminating the root and intermediate certificates
   from the TLS certificate chain without impacting trust negotiation.
   It also delivers better compression than alternative proposals whilst
   ensuring fair treatment for both CAs and website operators.  It may
   also be useful in other applications which store certificate chains,
   e.g.  Certificate Transparency logs.

About This Document

   This note is to be removed before publishing as an RFC.

   The latest revision of this draft can be found at
   https://tlswg.github.io/draft-ietf-tls-cert-abridge/draft-ietf-tls-
   cert-abridge.html.  Status information for this document may be found
   at https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-tls-cert-abridge/.

   Discussion of this document takes place on the Transport Layer
   Security Working Group mailing list (mailto:tls@ietf.org), which is
   archived at https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/tls/.  Subscribe
   at https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/tls/.

   Source for this draft and an issue tracker can be found at
   https://github.com/tlswg/draft-ietf-tls-cert-abridge.

Status of This Memo

   This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
   provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
   Task Force (IETF).  Note that other groups may also distribute
   working documents as Internet-Drafts.  The list of current Internet-
   Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.




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   Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
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   This Internet-Draft will expire on 9 March 2024.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2023 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.

   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
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   provided without warranty as described in the Revised BSD License.

Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
     1.1.  Motivation  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
     1.2.  Overview  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
     1.3.  Relationship to other drafts  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
     1.4.  Status  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   2.  Conventions and Definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   3.   Abridged Compression Scheme  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     3.1.  Pass 1: Intermediate and Root Compression . . . . . . . .   6
       3.1.1.  Enumeration of Known Intermediate and Root
               Certificates  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
       3.1.2.  Compression of CA Certificates in Certificate
               Chain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
     3.2.  Pass 2: End-Entity Compression  . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
       3.2.1.  Construction of Shared Dictionary . . . . . . . . . .   9
   4.  Preliminary Evaluation  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
   5.  Deployment Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  12
     5.1.  Dictionary Versioning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  12
     5.2.  Version Migration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  13
     5.3.  Disk Space Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  13
     5.4.  Implementation Complexity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  14
   6.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  14
   7.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  15
   8.  References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  15
     8.1.  Normative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  15
     8.2.  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  16



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   Appendix A.  Acknowledgments  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  17
   Appendix B.  CCADB Churn and Dictionary Negotiation . . . . . . .  17
     B.1.  CCADB Churn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  18
     B.2.  Dictionary Negotiation  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  18
   Author's Address  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  19

1.  Introduction

1.1.  Motivation

   When a server responds to a TLS Client Hello, the size of its initial
   flight of packets is limited by the underlying transport protocol.
   If the size limit is exceeded, the server must wait for the client to
   acknowledge receipt before concluding the flight, incurring the
   additional latency of a round trip before the handshake can complete.
   For TLS handshakes over TCP, the size limit is typically around
   14,500 bytes.  For TLS handshakes in QUIC, the limit is much lower at
   a maximum of 4500 bytes ([RFC9000], Section 8.1).

   The existing compression schemes used in [TLSCertCompress] have been
   shown to deliver a substantial improvement in QUIC handshake latency
   [FastlyStudy], [QUICStudy] by reducing the size of server's
   certificate chain and so fitting the server's initial messages within
   a single flight.  However, in a post-quantum setting, the signatures
   and public keys used in a TLS certificate chain will be typically 10
   to 40 times their current size and cannot be compressed with existing
   TLS Certificate Compression schemes.  Consequently studies [SCAStudy]
   [PQStudy] have shown that post-quantum certificate transmission
   becomes the dominant source of latency in PQ TLS with certificate
   chains alone expected to exceed even the TCP initial flight limit.
   This motivates alternative designs for reducing the wire size of
   post-quantum certificate chains.

1.2.  Overview

   This draft introduces a new TLS certificate compression scheme
   [TLSCertCompress] which is intended specifically for WebPKI
   applications.  It uses a predistributed dictionary consisting of all
   intermediate and root certificates contained in the root stores of
   major browsers which is sourced from the Common CA Database [CCADB].
   As of May 2023, this dictionary would be 3 MB in size and consist of
   roughly 2000 intermediate certificates and 200 root certificates.
   The disk footprint can be reduced to near zero as many clients (such
   as Mozilla Firefox & Google Chrome) are already provisioned with
   their trusted intermediate and root certificates for compatibility
   and performance reasons.





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   Using a shared dictionary allows for this compression scheme to
   deliver dramatically more effective compression than previous
   schemes, reducing the size of certificate chains in use today by
   ~75%, significantly improving on the ~25% reduction achieved by
   existing schemes.  A preliminary evaluation (Section 4) of this
   scheme suggests that 50% of certificate chains in use today would be
   compressed to under 1000 bytes and 95% to under 1500 bytes.
   Similarly to [SCA], this scheme effectively removes the CA
   certificates from the certificate chain on the wire but this draft
   achieves a much better compression ratio, since [SCA] removes the
   redundant information in chain that existing TLS Certificate
   Compression schemes exploit and is more fragile in the presence of
   out of sync clients or servers.

   Note that as this is only a compression scheme, it does not impact
   any trust decisions in the TLS handshake.  A client can offer this
   compression scheme whilst only trusting a subset of the certificates
   in the CCADB certificate listing, similarly a server can offer this
   compression scheme whilst using a certificate chain which does not
   chain back to a WebPKI root.  Furthermore, new root certificates are
   typically included in the CCADB at the start of their application to
   a root store, a process which typically takes more than a year.
   Consequently, applicant root certificates can be added to new
   versions of this scheme ahead of any trust decisions, allowing new
   CAs to compete on equal terms with existing CAs.  As a result this
   scheme is equitable in so far as it provides equal benefits for all
   CAs in the WebPKI, doesn't privilege any particular end-entity
   certificate or website and allows WebPKI clients to make individual
   trust decisions without fear of breakage.

1.3.  Relationship to other drafts

   This draft defines a certificate compression mechanism suitable for
   use with TLS Certificate Compression [TLSCertCompress].

   The intent of this draft is to provide an alternative to CA
   Certificate Suppression [SCA] as it provides a better compression
   ratio, can operate in a wider range of scenarios (including out of
   sync clients or servers) and doesn't require any additional error
   handling or retry mechanisms.

   CBOR Encoded X.509 (C509) [I-D.ietf-cose-cbor-encoded-cert-05]
   defines a concise alternative format for X.509 certificates.  If this
   format were to become widely used on the WebPKI, defining an
   alternative version of this draft specifically for C509 certificates
   would be beneficial.





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   Compact TLS, (cTLS) [I-D.ietf-tls-ctls-08] defines a version of
   TLS1.3 which allows a pre-configured client and server to establish a
   session with minimal overhead on the wire.  In particular, it
   supports the use of a predefined list of certificates known to both
   parties which can be compressed.  However, cTLS is still at an early
   stage and may be challenging to deploy in a WebPKI context due to the
   need for clients and servers to have prior knowledge of handshake
   profile in use.

   TLS Cached Information Extension [RFC7924] introduced a new extension
   allowing clients to signal they had cached certificate information
   from a previous connection and for servers to signal that the clients
   should use that cache instead of transmitting a redundant set of
   certificates.  However this RFC has seen little adoption in the wild
   due to concerns over client privacy.

   Handling long certificate chains in TLS-Based EAP Methods [RFC9191]
   discusses the challenges of long certificate chains outside the
   WebPKI ecosystem.  Although the scheme proposed in this draft is
   targeted at WebPKI use, defining alternative shared dictionaries for
   other major ecosystems may be of interest.

1.4.  Status

   This draft is still at an early stage.  Open questions are marked
   with the tag *DISCUSS*.

2.  Conventions and Definitions

   The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and
   "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in
   BCP 14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all
   capitals, as shown here.

   This draft refers to dates in Internet Date/Time Format as specified
   in Section 5.6 of [DATES] without the optional T separator.

3.   Abridged Compression Scheme

   This section describes a compression scheme suitable for compressing
   certificate chains used in TLS.  The scheme is defined in two parts.
   An initial pass compressing known intermediate and root certificates
   and then a subsequent pass compressing the end-entity certificate.

   The compression scheme in this draft has two parameters listed below
   which influence the construction of the static dictionary.  Future
   versions of this draft would use different parameters and so



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   construct different dictionaries which would be registered under
   different TLS Certificate Compression code points.  This is discussed
   further in Section 5.

   *  CCADB_SNAPSHOT_TIME - 2023-01-01 00:00:00Z

   *  CT_CERT_WINDOW - 2022-12-01 00:00:00Z to 2023-01-01 00:00:00Z

3.1.  Pass 1: Intermediate and Root Compression

   This pass relies on a shared listing of intermediate and root
   certificates known to both client and server.  As many clients (e.g.
   Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome) already ship with a list of
   trusted intermediate and root certificates, this pass allows their
   existing lists to be reused, rather than requiring them to have to be
   duplicated and stored in a separate format.  The first subsection
   details how the certificates are enumerated in an ordered list.  This
   ordered list is distributed to client and servers which use it to
   compress and decompress certificate chains as detailed in the
   subsequent subsection.

3.1.1.  Enumeration of Known Intermediate and Root Certificates

   The Common CA Database [CCADB] is operated by Mozilla on behalf of a
   number of Root Program operators including Mozilla, Microsoft,
   Google, Apple and Cisco.  The CCADB contains a listing of all the
   root certificates trusted by these root programs, as well as their
   associated intermediate certificates and not yet trusted certificates
   from new applicants to one or more root programs.

   At the time of writing, the CCADB contains around 200 root program
   certificates and 2000 intermediate certificates which are trusted for
   TLS Server Authentication, occupying 3 MB of disk space.  The listing
   used in this draft will be the relevant certificates included in the
   CCADB at CCADB_SNAPSHOT_TIME.

   As entries on this list typically have a lifespan of 10+ years and
   new certificates are added to the CCADB a year or or more before
   being marked as trusted, future drafts which include newer
   certificates will only need to be issued infrequently.  This is
   discussed further in Section 5.

   The algorithm for enumerating the list of compressible intermediate
   and root certificates is given below:

   1.  Query the CCADB for all known root and intermediate certificates
       [CCADBAllCerts] as of CCADB_SNAPSHOT_TIME




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   2.  Remove all certificates which have an extendedKeyUsage extension
       but do not have the TLS Server Authentication bit set or the
       anyExtendedKeyUsage bit set.

   3.  Remove all certificates whose notAfter date is on or before
       CCADB_SNAPSHOT_TIME.

   4.  Remove all root certificates which are not marked as trusted or
       in the process of applying to be trusted by at least one of the
       following browser root programs: Mozilla, Google, Microsoft,
       Apple.

   5.  Remove all intermediate certificates which are not signed by root
       certificates still in the listing.

   6.  Remove any certificates which are duplicates (have the same
       SHA256 certificate fingerprint)

   7.  Order the list by the date each certificate was included in the
       CCADB, breaking ties with the lexicographic ordering of the
       SHA256 certificate fingerprint.

   8.  Associate each element of the list with the concatenation of the
       constant 0xff and its index in the list represented as a uint16.

   [[*DISCUSS:* The four programs were selected because they represent
   certificate consumers in the CCADB.  Are there any other root
   programs which ought to be included?  The only drawback is a larger
   disk requirement, since this compression scheme does not impact trust
   decisions.]]

   [[*TODO:* Ask CCADB to provide an authoritative copy of this listing.
   A subset of these lists is available in benchmarks/data in this
   draft's repository.]]

3.1.2.  Compression of CA Certificates in Certificate Chain

   Compression Algorithm:

   *  Input: The byte representation of a Certificate message as defined
      in [TLS13] whose contents are X509 certificates.

   *  Output: opaque bytes suitable for transmission in a
      CompressedCertificate message defined in [TLSCertCompress].

   1.  Parse the message and extract a list of CertificateEntrys,
       iterate over the list.




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   2.  Check if cert_data is bitwise identical to any of the known
       intermediate or root certificates from the listing in the
       previous section.

       1.  If so, replace the opaque cert_data member of
           CertificateEntry with its adjusted three byte identifier and
           copy the CertificateEntry structure with corrected lengths to
           the output.

       2.  Otherwise, copy the CertificateEntry entry to the output
           without modification.

   3.  Correct the length field for the Certificate message.

   The resulting output should be a well-formatted Certificate message
   payload with the known intermediate and root certificates replaced
   with three byte identifiers.

   The decompression algorithm requires the above steps but in reverse,
   swapping any recognized three-byte identifier in a cert_data field
   with the DER representation of the associated certificate and
   updating the lengths.  Unrecognized three-byte identifiers are
   ignored.  If the compressed certificate chain cannot be parsed (e.g.
   due to incorrect length fields) the decompression algorithm SHOULD
   return the sentinel value 0xff.  Note that the connection will fail
   regardless even if this step is not taken as neither certificate
   validation nor transcript validation can succeed.

3.2.  Pass 2: End-Entity Compression

   This section describes a pass based on Zstandard [ZSTD] with
   application-specified dictionaries.  The dictionary is constructed
   with reference to the list of intermediate and root certificates
   discussed earlier in Section 3.1.1, as well as several external
   sources of information.

   [[*DISCUSS:* This draft is unopinionated about the underlying
   compression scheme is used as long as it supports application
   specified dictionaries.  Is there an argument for using a different
   scheme?]]











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3.2.1.  Construction of Shared Dictionary

   [[*DISCUSS / TODO:* This section remains a work in progress and needs
   refinement.  The goal is to produce a dictionary of minimal size
   which provides maximum compression whilst treating every CA
   equitably.  Currently this dictionary occupies ~65KB of space, is
   equitable and has performance within a ~100 bytes of the best known
   alternative.  This is discussed further in Section 4.]]

   The dictionary is built by systematic combination of the common
   strings used in certificates by each issuer in the known list
   described in Section 3.1.1.  This dictionary is constructed in three
   stages, with the output of each stage being concatenated with the
   next.  Implementations of this scheme need only consume the finished
   dictionary and do not need to construct it themselves.

   Firstly, for each intermediate certificate enumerated in the listing
   in Section 3.1.1., extract the issuer field (Section 4.1.2.4 of
   [RFC5280]) and derive the matching authority key identifier
   (Section 4.2.1.1 of [RFC5280]) for the certificate.  Order them
   according to the listing in Section 3.1.1.

   Secondly, take the listing of certificate transparency logs trusted
   by the root programs selected in Section 3.1.1, which are located
   at[AppleCTLogs] [GoogleCTLogs] as of CCADB_SNAPSHOT_TIME and extract
   the list of log identifiers.  Remove duplicates and order them
   lexicographically.

   Finally, enumerate all certificates contained within certificate
   transparency logs above and witnessed during CT_CERT_WINDOW.  For
   each issuer in the listing in Section 3.1.1, select the first end-
   entity certificate when ordered by the log id (lexicographically) and
   latest witnessed date.

   Extract the contents of the following extensions from the end-entity
   certificate selected for each issuer:

   *  Authority Information Access (Section 4.2.2.1 of [RFC5280])

   *  Certificate Policies (Section 4.2.1.4 of [RFC5280])

   *  CRL Distribution Points (Section 4.2.1.13 of [RFC5280])

   *  Freshest CRL (Section 4.2.1.15 of [RFC5280])







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   Concatenate the byte representation of each extension (including
   extension id and length) and copy it to the output.  If no end-entity
   certificate can be found for an issuer with this process, omit the
   entry for that issuer.

   [[*DISCUSS:* This last step is picking a single certificate issued by
   each issuer as a canonical reference to use for compression.  The
   ordering chosen allows the dictionary builder to stop traversing CT
   as soon as they've found an entry for each issuer.  It would be much
   more efficient to just ask CAs to submit this information to the
   CCADB directly.]]

3.2.1.1.  Compression of End-Entity Certificates in Certificate Chain

   The resulting bytes from Pass 1 are passed to ZStandard [ZSTD] with
   the dictionary specified in the previous section.  It is RECOMMENDED
   that the compressor (i.e. the server) use the following parameters:

   *  chain_log=30

   *  search_log=30

   *  hash_log=30

   *  target_length=6000

   *  threads=1

   *  compression_level=22

   *  force_max_window=1

   These parameters are recommended in order to achieve the best
   compression ratio however implementations MAY use their preferred
   parameters as these parameters are not used during decompression.
   With TLS Certificate Compression, the server needs to only perform a
   single compression at startup and cache the result, so optimizing for
   maximal compression is recommended.  The client's decompression speed
   is insensitive to these parameters.

4.  Preliminary Evaluation

   [[*NOTE:* This section to be removed prior to publication.]]








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   The storage footprint refers to the on-disk size required for the
   end-entity dictionary.  The other columns report the 5th, 50th and
   95th percentile of the resulting certificate chains.  The evaluation
   set was a ~75,000 certificate chains from the Tranco list using the
   python scripts in the draft's Github repository.

   +==========================+===================+======+======+======+
   | Scheme                   | Storage           | p5   | p50  | p95  |
   |                          | Footprint         |      |      |      |
   +==========================+===================+======+======+======+
   | Original                 | 0                 | 2308 | 4032 | 5609 |
   +--------------------------+-------------------+------+------+------+
   | TLS Cert Compression     | 0                 | 1619 | 3243 | 3821 |
   +--------------------------+-------------------+------+------+------+
   | Intermediate Suppression | 0                 | 1020 | 1445 | 3303 |
   | and TLS Cert Compression |                   |      |      |      |
   +--------------------------+-------------------+------+------+------+
   | *This Draft*             | 65336             | 661  | 1060 | 1437 |
   +--------------------------+-------------------+------+------+------+
   | *This Draft with opaque  | 3000              | 562  | 931  | 1454 |
   | trained dictionary*      |                   |      |      |      |
   +--------------------------+-------------------+------+------+------+
   | Hypothetical Optimal     | 0                 | 377  | 742  | 1075 |
   | Compression              |                   |      |      |      |
   +--------------------------+-------------------+------+------+------+

                                  Table 1

   *  'Original' refers to the sampled certificate chains without any
      compression.

   *  'TLS Cert Compression' used ZStandard with the parameters
      configured for maximum compression as defined in
      [TLSCertCompress].

   *  'Intermediate Suppression and TLS Cert Compression' was modelled
      as the elimination of all certificates in the intermediate and
      root certificates with the Basic Constraints CA value set to true.
      If a cert chain included an unrecognized certificate with CA
      status, then no CA certificates were removed from that chain.  The
      cert chain was then passed to 'TLS Cert Compression' as a second
      pass.

   *  'This Draft with opaque trained dictionary' refers to pass 1 and
      pass 2 as defined by this draft, but instead using a 3000 byte
      dictionary for pass 2 which was produced by the Zstandard
      dictionary training algorithm.  This illustrates a ceiling on what
      ought to be possible by improving the construction of the pass 2



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      dictionary in this document.  However, using this trained
      dictionary directly will not treat all CA's equitably, as the
      dictionary will be biased towards compressing the most popular CAs
      more effectively.

   *  'Hypothetical Optimal Compression' is the resulting size of the
      cert chain after reducing it to only the public key in the end-
      entity certificate, the CA signature over the EE cert, the
      embedded SCT signatures and a compressed list of domains in the
      SAN extension.  This represents the best possible compression as
      it entirely removes any CA certs, identifiers, field tags and
      lengths and non-critical extensions such as OCSP, CRL and policy
      extensions.

5.  Deployment Considerations

5.1.  Dictionary Versioning

   The scheme defined in this draft is deployed with the static
   dictionaries constructed from the parameters listed in Section 3
   fixed to a particular TLS Certificate Compression code point.

   As new CA certificates are added to the CCADB and deployed on the
   web, new versions of this draft would need to be issued with their
   own code point and dictionary parameters.  However, the process of
   adding new root certificates to a root store is already a two to
   three year process and this scheme includes untrusted root
   certificates still undergoing the application process in its
   dictionary.  As a result, it would be reasonable to expect a new
   version of this scheme with updated dictionaries to be issued at most
   once a year and more likely once every two or three years.

   A more detailed analysis and discussion of CA certificate lifetimes
   and root store operations is included in Appendix B, as well as an
   alternative design which would allow for dictionary negotiation
   rather than fixing one dictionary per code point.

   [[*DISCUSS:* Are there concerns over this approach?  Would using at
   most one code point per year be acceptable?  Currently 3 of the 16384
   'Specification Required' IANA managed code points are in use.]]











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5.2.  Version Migration

   As new versions of this scheme are specified, clients and servers
   would benefit from migrating to the latest version.  Whilst servers
   using CA certificates outside the scheme's listing can still offer
   this compression scheme and partially benefit from it, migrating to
   the latest version ensures that new CAs can compete on a level
   playing field with existing CAs.  It is possible for a client or
   server to offer multiple versions of this scheme without having to
   pay twice the storage cost, since the majority of the stored data is
   in the pass 1 certificate listing and the majority of certificates
   will be in both versions and so need only be stored once.

   Clients and servers SHOULD offer the latest version of this scheme
   and MAY offer one or more historical versions.  Although clients and
   servers which fall out of date will no longer benefit from the
   scheme, they will not suffer any other penalties or
   incompatibilities.  Future schemes will likely establish recommended
   lifetimes for sunsetting a previous version and adopting a new one.

   As the majority of clients deploying this scheme are likely to be web
   browsers which typically use monthly release cycles (even long term
   support versions like Firefox ESR offer point releases on a monthly
   basis), this is unlikely to be a restriction in practice.  The
   picture is more complex for servers as operators are often to
   reluctant to update TLS libraries, but as a new version only requires
   changes to static data without any new code and would happen
   infrequently, this is unlikely to be burdensome in practice.

5.3.  Disk Space Requirements

   Clients and servers implementing this scheme need to store a listing
   of root and intermediate certificates for pass 1, which currently
   occupies around ~3 MB and a smaller dictionary on the order of ~100
   KB for pass 2.  Clients and servers offering multiple versions of
   this scheme do not need to duplicate the pass 1 listing, as multiple
   versions can refer to same string.

   As popular web browsers already ship a complete list of trusted
   intermediate and root certificates, their additional storage
   requirements are minimal.  Servers offering this scheme are intended
   to be 'full-fat' web servers and so typically have plentiful storage
   already.  This draft is not intended for use in storage-constrained
   IoT devices, but alternative versions with stripped down listings may
   be suitable.






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   [[*DISCUSS:* The current draft priorities an equitable treatment for
   every recognized and applicant CA over minimizing storage
   requirements.  The required disk space could be significantly reduced
   by only including CAs which meet a particular popularity threshold
   via CT log sampling.]]

5.4.  Implementation Complexity

   Although much of this draft is dedicated to the construction of the
   certificate list and dictionary used in the scheme, implementations
   are indifferent to these details.  Pass 1 can be implemented as a
   simple string substitution and pass 2 with a single call to
   permissively licensed and widely distributed Zstandard
   implementations such as [ZstdImpl].  Future versions of this draft
   which vary the dictionary construction then only require changes to
   the static data shipped with these implementations and the use of a
   new code point.

   There are several options for handling the distribution of the
   associated static data.  One option is to distribute it directly with
   the TLS library and update it as part of that library's regular
   release cycle.  Whilst this is easy for statically linked libraries
   written in languages which offer first-class package management and
   compile time feature selection (e.g.  Go, Rust), it is trickier for
   dynamically linked libraries who are unlikely to want to incur the
   increased distribution size.  In these ecosystems it may make sense
   to distribute the dictionaries are part of an independent package
   managed by the OS which can be discovered by the library at run-time.
   Another promising alternative would be to have existing automated
   certificate tooling provision the library with both the full
   certificate chain and multiple precompressed chains during the
   certificate issuance / renewal process.

6.  Security Considerations

   This draft does not introduce new security considerations for TLS,
   except for the considerations already identified in
   [TLSCertCompress].  In particular incorrect compression or
   decompression will lead to the TLS connection failing as the client
   and server transcripts will differ, with at least one necessarily
   including the original certificate chain rather than the decompressed
   version.  However, implementors SHOULD use a memory-safe language to
   implement this compression scheme.

   Note that as this draft specifies a compression scheme, it does not
   impact the negotiation of trust between clients and servers and is
   robust in the face of changes to CCADB or trust in a particular
   WebPKI CA.  The client's trusted list of CAs does not need to be a



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   subset or superset of the CCADB list and revocation of trust in a CA
   does not impact the operation of this compression scheme.  Similarly,
   servers who use roots or intermediates outside the CCADB can still
   offer and benefit from this scheme.

7.  IANA Considerations

   [[*TODO:* Adopt an identifier for experimental purposes.]]

8.  References

8.1.  Normative References

   [AppleCTLogs]
              Apple, "Certificate Transparency Logs trusted by Apple", 5
              June 2023, <https://valid.apple.com/ct/log_list/
              current_log_list.json>.

   [CCADBAllCerts]
              Mozilla, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Cisco, "CCADB
              Certificates Listing", 5 June 2023,
              <https://ccadb.my.salesforce-sites.com/ccadb/
              AllCertificateRecordsCSVFormat>.

   [DATES]    Klyne, G. and C. Newman, "Date and Time on the Internet:
              Timestamps", RFC 3339, DOI 10.17487/RFC3339, July 2002,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3339>.

   [GoogleCTLogs]
              Google, "Certificate Transparency Logs trusted by Google",
              5 June 2023, <https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromiu
              m/src/+/main:components/certificate_transparency/data/
              log_list.json>.

   [RFC2119]  Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
              Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2119>.

   [RFC5280]  Cooper, D., Santesson, S., Farrell, S., Boeyen, S.,
              Housley, R., and W. Polk, "Internet X.509 Public Key
              Infrastructure Certificate and Certificate Revocation List
              (CRL) Profile", RFC 5280, DOI 10.17487/RFC5280, May 2008,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5280>.

   [RFC8174]  Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC
              2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174,
              May 2017, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8174>.



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   [TLS13]    Rescorla, E., "The Transport Layer Security (TLS) Protocol
              Version 1.3", RFC 8446, DOI 10.17487/RFC8446, August 2018,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8446>.

   [TLSCertCompress]
              Ghedini, A. and V. Vasiliev, "TLS Certificate
              Compression", RFC 8879, DOI 10.17487/RFC8879, December
              2020, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8879>.

   [ZSTD]     Collet, Y. and M. Kucherawy, Ed., "Zstandard Compression
              and the 'application/zstd' Media Type", RFC 8878,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC8878, February 2021,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8878>.

8.2.  Informative References

   [CCADB]    Mozilla, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Cisco, "Common CA
              Database", 5 June 2023, <https://www.ccadb.org/>.

   [FastlyStudy]
              McManus, P., "Does the QUIC handshake require compression
              to be fast?", 18 May 2020, <https://www.fastly.com/blog/
              quic-handshake-tls-compression-certificates-extension-
              study>.

   [I-D.ietf-cose-cbor-encoded-cert-05]
              Mattsson, J. P., Selander, G., Raza, S., Höglund, J., and
              M. Furuhed, "CBOR Encoded X.509 Certificates (C509
              Certificates)", Work in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-
              ietf-cose-cbor-encoded-cert-05, 10 January 2023,
              <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-cose-
              cbor-encoded-cert-05>.

   [I-D.ietf-tls-ctls-08]
              Rescorla, E., Barnes, R., Tschofenig, H., and B. M.
              Schwartz, "Compact TLS 1.3", Work in Progress, Internet-
              Draft, draft-ietf-tls-ctls-08, 13 March 2023,
              <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-tls-
              ctls-08>.

   [PQStudy]  Westerbaan, B., "Sizing Up Post-Quantum Signatures", 8
              November 2021, <https://blog.cloudflare.com/sizing-up-
              post-quantum-signatures/>.

   [QUICStudy]
              Nawrocki, M., Tehrani, P., Hiesgen, R., Mücke, J.,
              Schmidt, T., and M. Wählisch, "On the interplay between
              TLS certificates and QUIC performance", ACM, Proceedings



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              of the 18th International Conference on emerging
              Networking EXperiments and Technologies,
              DOI 10.1145/3555050.3569123, November 2022,
              <https://doi.org/10.1145/3555050.3569123>.

   [RFC7924]  Santesson, S. and H. Tschofenig, "Transport Layer Security
              (TLS) Cached Information Extension", RFC 7924,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC7924, July 2016,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7924>.

   [RFC9000]  Iyengar, J., Ed. and M. Thomson, Ed., "QUIC: A UDP-Based
              Multiplexed and Secure Transport", RFC 9000,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC9000, May 2021,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9000>.

   [RFC9191]  Sethi, M., Preuß Mattsson, J., and S. Turner, "Handling
              Large Certificates and Long Certificate Chains in TLS-
              Based EAP Methods", RFC 9191, DOI 10.17487/RFC9191,
              February 2022, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9191>.

   [SCA]      Kampanakis, P., Bytheway, C., Westerbaan, B., and M.
              Thomson, "Suppressing CA Certificates in TLS 1.3", Work in
              Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-kampanakis-tls-scas-
              latest-03, 5 January 2023,
              <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-kampanakis-
              tls-scas-latest-03>.

   [SCAStudy] Kampanakis, P. and M. Kallitsis, "Faster Post-Quantum TLS
              Handshakes Without Intermediate CA Certificates", Springer
              International Publishing, Cyber Security, Cryptology, and
              Machine Learning pp. 337-355,
              DOI 10.1007/978-3-031-07689-3_25, ISBN ["9783031076886",
              "9783031076893"], 2022,
              <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07689-3_25>.

   [ZstdImpl] Facebook, "ZStandard (Zstd)", 5 June 2023,
              <https://github.com/facebook/zstd>.

Appendix A.  Acknowledgments

   The authors thank Bas Westerbaan, Martin Thomson and Kathleen Wilson
   for feedback on early versions of this document.

Appendix B.  CCADB Churn and Dictionary Negotiation







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B.1.  CCADB Churn

   Typically around 10 or so new root certificates are introduced to the
   WebPKI each year.  The various root programs restrict the lifetimes
   of these certificates, Microsoft to between 8 and 25 years (3.A.3
   (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/security/trusted-root/program-
   requirements)), Mozilla to between 0 and 14 years (Summary
   (https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA/Root_CA_Lifecycles)).  Chrome has
   proposed a maximum lifetime of 7 years in the future (Blog Post
   (https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/root-ca-policy/
   moving-forward-together/)).  Some major CAs have objected to this
   proposed policy as the root inclusion process currently takes around
   3 years from start to finish (Digicert Blog
   (https://www.digicert.com/blog/googles-moving-forward-together-
   proposals-for-root-ca-policy)).  Similarly, Mozilla requires CAs to
   apply to renew their roots with at least 2 years notice (Summary
   (https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA/Root_CA_Lifecycles)).

   Typically around 100 to 200 new WebPKI intermediate certificates are
   issued each year.  No WebPKI root program currently limits the
   lifetime of intermediate certificates, but they are in practice
   capped by the lifetime of their parent root certificate.  The vast
   majority of these certificates are issued with 10 year lifespans.  A
   small but notable fraction (<10%) are issued with 2 or 3 year
   lifetimes.  Chrome's Root Program has proposed that Intermediate
   Certificates be limited to 3 years in the future (Update
   (https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/root-ca-policy/
   moving-forward-together/)).  However, the motivation for this
   requirement is unclear.  Unlike root certificates, intermediate
   certificates are only required to be disclosed with a month's notice
   to the CCADB (Mozilla Root Program Section 5.3.2
   (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/security-
   group/certs/policy/#53-intermediate-certificates), Chrome Policy
   (https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/root-ca-policy/)).

B.2.  Dictionary Negotiation

   This draft is currently written with a view to being adopted as a
   particular TLS Certificate Compression Scheme.  However, this means
   that each dictionary used in the wild must have an assigned code
   point.  A new dictionary would likely need to be issued no more than
   yearly.  However, negotiating the dictionary used would avoid the
   overhead of minting a new draft and code point.  A sketch for how
   dictionary negotiation might work is below.

   This draft would instead define a new extension, which would define
   TLS Certificate Compression with ZStandard Dictionaries.
   Dictionaries would be identified by an IANA-assigned identifier of



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   two bytes, with a further two bytes for the major version and two
   more for the minor version.  Adding new certificates to a dictionary
   listing would require a minor version bump.  Removing certificates or
   changing the pass 2 dictionary would require a major version bump.

   struct {
     uint16 identifier;
     uint16 major_version;
     uint16 minor_version;
   } DictionaryId

   struct {
     DictionaryId supported_dictionaries<6..2^16-1>
   } ZStdSharedDictXtn

   The client lists their known dictionaries in an extension in the
   ClientHello.  The client need only retain and advertise the highest
   known minor version for any major version of a dictionary they are
   willing to offer.  The server may select any dictionary it has a copy
   of with matching identifier, matching major version number and a
   minor version number not greater than the client's minor version
   number.

   The expectation would be that new minor versions would be issued
   monthly or quarterly, with new major versions only every year or
   multiple years.  This reflects the relative rates of when
   certificates are added or removed to the CCADB listing.  This means
   in practice clients would likely offer a single dictionary containing
   their latest known version.  Servers would only need to update their
   dictionaries yearly when a new major version is produced.

Author's Address

   Dennis Jackson
   Mozilla
   Email: ietf@dennis-jackson.uk















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