Subject: [Ace] draft-erdtman-ace-rpcc and RFC7521

From: Samuel Erdtman <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2017 11:14:21 +0200

Hi Mike and others,

During the ACE session at the IETF meeting in Prague I presented
draft-erdtman-ace-rpcc and Mike asked how it relates to RFC7521.

Here comes a short summary, hope is clarify things.

One could probably achieve something similar to what we want by creating a
profile of the RFC7521 framework. However I think we would end up with
something much more complex than what we need with much more work.

The case we want to solve is authentication of the client for interactions
with endpoints such as token and introspection (with something more
suitable for constrained devices than client_secret i.e. a password).
We assume that the client has a key to use for the authentication a
Raw-Public-Key (RPK) or a Pre-Shared-Key (PSK)

If we look at draft-ietf-oauth-mtls it defines how to do client
authentication with a certificate. The functionality for client
authentication with certificates are wide spread and well understood, i.e.
cheep to implement.
In our case we similarly want to piggyback on the availability of RPK and
PSK authentication, we do not want to define a new Holder-of-Key schema and
put it on top of (D)TLS. RFC7521 does not define a solution for holder of
the Holder-of-Key Assertions, so we would have to do that.

Based on this we think it would be valuable to have a specification that
defines how to use RPK and PSK for client authentication before it becomes
defined in the wild (like with certificates).

Best regards
//Samuel