Subject: I-D Action:draft-freeman-message-access-control-req-00.txt

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2011 15:15:01 -0800

A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.

	Title           : Requirements for Message Access Control
	Author(s)       : T. Freeman, et al.
	Filename        : draft-freeman-message-access-control-req-00.txt
	Pages           : 17
	Date            : 2011-01-20

There are many situations where organizations want to include
  information which is subject to regulatory or other complex access
  control policy in email. Regulated information requires some form of
  robust access control to protect the confidentiality of the
  information. The Enhanced Security Services for S/MIME [rfc2634]
  defines an access control mechanism for S/MIME (eSSSecurityLabel).
  This is a signed attribute of a SignedData object which indicates the
  access control policy for the message. The fact that this is a signed
  attribute protects the integrity of the data and the binding of the
  label to the message but does not protect the confidentiality of the
  information i.e. at the point where you lean the access control policy
  to the data you also have access to the data. While the signature
  provides integrity for the label over the clear text, it is
  susceptible to unauthorized removal i.e. if you only have SignedData
  message, any MTA in the mail path can remove a signature layer and
  therefore remove the access control data.  Encrypting the signed
  message protects the confidentiality of the data and protects the
  SignedData from unauthorized removal but this hides the ESS security
  label.

  From a regulatory enforcement perspective this is an extremely weak
  form of access control because cryptographic access to the data is
  given before the access check. The correct enforcement of the access
  check totally depends on the configuration of the recipients email
  client. Since the cryptographic access is granted before the access
  checks, there is no significant impediment for a recipient who is
  unauthorized under the policy to access the data. A stronger
  enforcement model is needed for regulatory control for email where
  cryptographic access is only granted after the access check.

  There are also many users on the Internet today who have some form of
  authentication credential but they are not X.509 certificates and who
  therefore cannot use S/MIME. There are now available, standard based
  services (e.g. [SAML-overview]) which abstract the specifics of a
  technology used to authenticate uses from the application itself
(S/MIME in this case). Adoption of this abstraction model would enable
  a broader set of users who have other types to authentication
  credentials to be able to use S/MIME to secure email. It also allows
  for new authentication technology to be deployed without impacting the
  core S/MIME protocol. 

  This document specifies the requirements for:-

Providing robust access control for S/MIME

An abstraction layer for supporting other types of credentials for

using S/MIME.

A URL for this Internet-Draft is:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-freeman-message-access-control-req-00.txt

Internet-Drafts are also available by anonymous FTP at:
ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/

Below is the data which will enable a MIME compliant mail reader
implementation to automatically retrieve the ASCII version of the
Internet-Draft.