Subject: WG Review: Credential and Provisioning (enroll)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2003 15:50:07 -0400

A new IETF working group has been proposed in the Security Area.  
The IESG has not made any determination as yet. The following description 
was submitted, and is provided for informational purposes only.  Please send 
your comments to the IESG mailing list ([email-masked]) by October 27th.

Credential and Provisioning (enroll)
------------------------------------

Current Status: Proposed Working Group

Description:

 There are many cases where a service consumer needs to contact a
 service provider to get credentials that the consumer can use when
 accessing the service; part of this initial contact may involve
 the consumer and the provider mutually validating the other's identity.
 This working group will look at some of the cases where cryptography
 is used to provide authentication.

 When doing enrollment of a service consumer against a service provider,
 three pieces of information need to be provided or created in order to
 support authentication of the service consumer to the service provider
 (and visa versa) and to allow for additional security services to be
 provided any information exchanged. These pieces of data are:

       1. An identifier, within a namespace controlled by the service
                 provider, for the service consumer.
       2. Keying information to be used for identity confirmation.
       3. A set of service consumer permissions. These permissions
                 describe to the provider the services that the consumer
                 wants to access, and they describe to the consumer what
                 services offered by the provider will be accessable.

 Each of these data items could be created by either the consumer or
 provider at any point during the enrollment process.

 This group will create a model to be used in describing enrollment
 procedures and create a document for a framework how this is to be done.
 The group will then produce three documents profiling the use of the
 framework for the following types of keying material:

       1. A shared secret key.
       2. A bare asymmetric key.
       3. A bound asymmetric key (such as an X.509 certificate).

 As part of the validation of the framework, the group will examine how
 other real world enrollment procedures could be profiled. For example,
 credit card information might be part of the input to the enrollment
 process.