Federated TLS Authentication

Status of This Memo

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction

This document describes how to establish a secure end-to-end channel between two parties within a federation, where both client and server are mutually authenticated (TLS [RFC8446]). The trust relationship is based upon a trust anchor held and published by the federation. A federation is a trusted third party that inter-connect different trust domains with a common set of policies and standards. The federation aggregates and publishes information (“federation metadata”) about all the federated entities including certificate issuers and public key information. When the term “federation metadata” is used in this document, it always refer to the aggregated information published by a federation in the sense of this document.¶

The federation provides a common framework for providing endpoint information. When two parties establish a connection, the information of the other endpoint is retrieved from the metadata. The parties leverage this every time they commence a transaction with a new entity in the federation.¶

Mutual TLS authentication involves provisioning of key material. This key exchange is performed through the publication of the federation metadata by the federation and the use of that federation metadata by its members. Without a federation, the server side is often required to create a public key infrastructure (PKI) in order to distribute client certificates.The Swedish education sector uses federated TLS authentication to secure endpoints used for user lifecycle management . That Federation is a collaboration between school authorities and service providers. If the certificate distribution would be handled without a federated framework, it would mean a higher administrative burden and a higher risk of compromised security.¶

2. Federation Chain of Trust

The members of a federation submit their issuer certificates and other requested data (in this document called “member metadata”) to the federation. Both the authenticity of the submitted member metadata and the submitting member MUST be assured by the federation. How this is achieved is out of scope for this document. The federation operator aggregates, signs and publishes the federation metadata, i.e., an aggregation of all members’ member metadata and some additional information added by the federation. By trusting the federation and its certificate, federation members trust the federation metadata content.¶

The root of the chain of trust is the federation metadata signature and the trust anchor is the federation's signing certificate. That certificate needs to be securely distributed, there MUST be an out-of-band function to verify the certificate. The distribution and verification of the federation's certificate is out-of-scope of this document.¶

3. Authentication

All TLS sessions between clients and servers are authenticated via mutual TLS authentication. Trust is limited to the set of public key pins published for each endpoint in the federation metadata. Public key pinning associates a public key with an endpoint to reduce the risk of attacks with rogue certificates. Public key pinning is defined in [RFC7469]. Pins are collected from federation metadata. It is up to the federation to establish a discovery process for finding relevant pins. There are metadata claims to aid the discovery process (e.g., organization, tags, description). Clients and servers preload the selected pins as defined in [RFC7469], section 2.7, before establishing a connection.¶

Upon connection, the endpoints (client and server) MUST either use pinning or validate the received certificate using the entity's published pins. Issuers in metadata MAY be used to verify certificate issuers. It is up to each implementation to decide if these are needed.¶

If a TLS session is terminated separately from the application (e.g., when using a reverse proxy). The termination point can either use optional untrusted TLS client certificate authentication or validate the certificate issuer. Pin validation MAY then be deferred to the application, given that the peer certificate is transferred to the application (e.g., via an HTTP header).¶

Failure to validate a received certificate triggers termination of the connection.¶

4. Federation Metadata

Federation metadata is published as a JWS [RFC7519]. The payload contains statements about federation members entities.¶

Metadata is used for authentication and service discovery. A client select a server based on metadata claims (e.g., organization, tags). The client then use the selected server claims base_uri, pins and if needed issuers to establish a connection.¶

Upon receiving a connection, a server validates the received client certificate using the client's published pins. Server MAY also check other claims such as organization and tags to determine if the connections is accepted or terminated.¶

{
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "cache_ttl": 3600,
  "entities": [{
    "entity_id": "https://example.com",
    "organization": "Example Org",
    "issuers": [{
      "x509certificate": "-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----\nMIIDDDCCAf
      SgAwIBAgIJAIOsfJBStJQhMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBCwUAMBsxGTAXBgNV\nBAM
      MEHNjaW0uZXhhbXBsZS5jb20wHhcNMTcwNDA2MDc1MzE3WhcNMTcwNTA2MD
      c1\nMzE3WjAbMRkwFwYDVQQDDBBzY2ltLmV4YW1wbGUuY29tMIIBIjANBgk
      qhkiG9w0B\nAQEFAAOCAQ8AMIIBCgKCAQEAyr+3dXTC8YXoi0LDJTH0lTfv
      8omQivWFOr3+/PBE\n6hmpLSNXK/EZJBD6ZT4Q+tY8dPhyhzT5RFZCVlrDs
      e/kY00F4yoflKiqx9WSuCrq\nZFr1AUtIfGR/LvRUvDFtuHo1MzFttiK8Wr
      wskMYZrw1zLHTIVwBkfMw1qr2XzxFK\njt0CcDmFxNdY5Q8kuBojH9+xt5s
      ZbrJ9AVH/OI8JamSqDjk9ODyGg+GrEZFClP/B\nxa4Fsl04En/9GfaJnCU1
      NpU0cqvWbVUlLOy8DaQMN14HIdkTdmegEsg2LR/XrJkt\nho16diAXrgS25
      3xbkdD3T5d6lHiZCL6UxkBh4ZHRcoftSwIDAQABo1MwUTAdBgNV\nHQ4EFg
      QUs1dXuhGhGc2UNb7ikn3t6cBuU34wHwYDVR0jBBgwFoAUs1dXuhGhGc2U\
      nNb7ikn3t6cBuU34wDwYDVR0TAQH/BAUwAwEB/zANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQsFAA
      OCAQEA\nrR9wxPhUa2XfQ0agAC0oC8TFf8wbTYb0ElP5Ej834xMMW/wWTSA
      N8/3WqOWNQJ23\nf0vEeYQwfvbD2fjLvYTyM2tSPOWrtQpKuvulIrxV7Zz8
      A61NIjblE3rfea1eC8my\nTkDOlMKV+wlXXgUxirride+6ubOWRGf92fgze
      DGJWkmm/a9tj0L/3e0xIXeujxC7\nMIt3p99teHjvnZQ7FiIBlvGc1o8FD1
      FKmFYd74s7RxrAusBEAAmBo3xyB89cFU0d\nKB2fkH2lkqiqkyOtjrlHPoy
      6ws6g1S6U/Jx9n0NEeEqCfzXnh9jEpxisSO+fBZER\npCwj2LMNPQxZBqBF
      oxbFPw==\n-----END CERTIFICATE-----"
    }],
    "servers": [{
      "description": "SCIM Server 1",
      "base_uri": "https://scim.example.com/",
      "pins": [{
        "alg": "sha256",
        "digest": "+hcmCjJEtLq4BRPhrILyhgn98Lhy6DaWdpmsBAgOLCQ="
      }],
      "tags": [
        "scim"
      ]
    }],
    "clients": [{
      "description": "SCIM Client 1",
      "pins": [{
        "alg": "sha256",
        "digest": "+hcmCjJEtLq4BRPhrILyhgn98Lhy6DaWdpmsBAgOLCQ="
      }]
    }]
  }]
}

5. Usage Examples

The examples in this section are non-normative.¶

The example below is from the federation called "Skolfederation" where federated TLS authentication is already in use. Clients and servers are registered in the federation. The clients intend to manage cross-domain user accounts within the service. The standard used for account management is SS 12000:2018 (i.e., a SCIM extension).¶

+---------------------------------------------+
|                                             |
|             Federation Metadata             |
|                                             |
+---+--------------------------+--------------+
    |                          |
   (A)                        (A)
    |                          |
    v                          v
+---+----+        +------------+--------------+
|Local MD|        |         Local MD          |
+---+----+        +----+------------- ---+----+
    |                  |                 |
   (B)                (C)               (F)
    |                  |                 |
    v                  v                 v
+---+----+        +----+---+        +----+---+
|        |        |        |        |        |
| Client |        | Reverse|        |  App   |
|        +--(D)-->+ Proxy  +--(E)-->+        |
|        |        |        |        |        |
|        |        |        |        |        |
+--------+        +--------+        +--------+

1. Entities collect member metadata from the federation metadata.¶
2. The client pins the server's public key pins.¶
3. The reverse proxy trust anchor is setup with the clients' certificate issuers.¶
4. The client establishes a connection with the server using the base_uri from the federation metadata.¶
5. The reverse proxy forwards the client certificate to the application.¶
6. The application converts the certificate to a public key pin and checks the federation metadata for a matching pin. The entity's entity_id should be used as an identifier.¶

  openssl x509 -in <certificate.pem> -pubkey -noout | \
  openssl pkey -pubin -outform der | \
  openssl dgst -sha256 -binary | \
  openssl enc -base64

  curl --cert client.pem --client.key --pinnedpubkey 'sha256//0Ok2aNf
  crCNDMhC2uXIdxBFOvMfEVtzlNVUT5pur0Dk=' https://host.example.com

6. Security Considerations

7. IANA Considerations

This document has no IANA actions.¶

8. Acknowledgements

This project was funded through the NGI0 PET Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 825310.¶

The authors would like to thank the following people for the detailed review and suggestions:¶

• Rasmus Larsson¶
• Mats Dufberg¶
• Joe Siltberg¶
• Stefan Norberg¶
• Petter Blomberg¶

The authors would also like to thank participants in the EGIL working group for their comments on this specification.¶

Authors' Addresses