Subject: [sidr] Certificate Transparency WG

From: Ben Laurie <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 7 Sep 2012 14:20:02 +0100

It has been suggested to me that the SIDR WG might be interested in
Certificate Transparency and a possible BoF in Atlanta. Please send
followup discussion to [email-masked].

Here's an (updated) draft charter.

CT IETF WG Draft Charter

version 2

Objective

Specify mechanisms and techniques that allow Internet applications to
monitor and verify the issuance of public X.509 certificates such that
all issued certificates are available to applications, and each
certificate seen by an application can be efficiently shown to be in
the log of issued certificates. Furthermore, it should be possible to
cryptographically verify the correct operation of the log.

Optionally, do the same for certificate revocations.

Problem Statement

Currently it is possible for any CA to issue a certificate for any
purpose without any oversight. This has led to some high profile
mis-issuance of web certificates, such as by DigiNotar, a subsidiary
of VASCO Data Security International, in July 2011
(http://www.vasco.com/company/about_vasco/press_room/news_archive/2011/news_diginotar_reports_security_incident.aspx).

The aim is to make it possible to detect such mis-issuance promptly
through the use of a public log of all public issued certificates.
Domain owners can then monitor this log and, upon detecting
mis-issuance, take appropriate action.

This public log must also be able to efficiently demonstrate its own
correct operation, rather than introducing yet another party that must
be trusted into the equation.

Clients should also be able to efficiently verify that certificates
they receive have indeed been entered into the public log.

For revocations, the aim would be similar: ensure that revocations are
as expected, that clients can efficiently obtain the revocation status
of a certificate and that the log is operating correctly.

Also, in both cases, the solution must be usable by browsers - this
means that it cannot add any round trips to page fetches, and that any
data transfers that are mandatory are of a reasonable size.

Existing Work

Certificate Transparency v2.1a
(http://www.links.org/files/CertificateTransparencyVersion2.1a.pdf)

Spec and working code:
http://code.google.com/p/certificate-transparency/source/browse/