Subject: [Acme] On the relationship between delegation and STAR

From: Thomas Fossati <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2020 13:26:03 +0000

Hi, all,

While working on the STAR delegation protocol we realised that the
"STAR" in "ACME STAR Delegation" is not a strict precondition to build a
delegation mechanism, and that we could quite easily relax the
assumption and have a more general ACME-based delegation that can work
with both STAR and traditional certs.

In order to do that, from a protocol mechanics standpoint, we'd just need
to add one "allow-certificate-get" attribute to the set of top-level
Order attributes, and one to the Directory's meta, with same exact
semantics as those currently defined in the "auto-renewal" namespace.

From an interface perspective, the only difference between non-STAR and
STAR delegation is that the former would allow the delegate to revoke
the cert using the cert's private key, whereas STAR certs don't have
access to the revocation interface -- that was originally conceived to
give tighter control to the delegator.  However, in hindsight it doesn't
seem like this would imply an increase in attack surface, while the
gain we'd get from the generalisation of the mechanism is quite
noticeable, we reckon.

Obviously we want to validate this scope change with the group before
proceeding.

Cheers!

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From: Thomas Fossati <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2020 21:29:18 +0000

Hearing no dissent, we are going to move forward with the plan below.

Thanks