Network Working Group Matt Blaze Internet Draft John Ioannidis Expires in six months AT&T Labs - Research Angelos D. Keromytis U. of Pennsylvania January 2000 DSA and RSA Key and Signature Encoding for the KeyNote Trust Management System Status of this Memo This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026. Please direct comments to one of the authors (for the authors contact information, see the end of this document), and/or to the trustmgt@east.isi.edu mailing list. Internet Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working Groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet Drafts. Internet-Drafts draft documents are valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress". The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html. Distribution of this memo is unlimited. Abstract This memo describes RSA and DSA key and signature encoding for version 2 of the KeyNote trust-management system. 1. Introduction KeyNote is a simple and flexible trust-management system designed to work well for a variety of large- and small- scale Internet-based applications. It provides a single, unified language for both local policies and credentials. KeyNote policies and credentials, called `assertions,' contain predicates that describe the trusted actions permitted by the holders of specific public keys. KeyNote assertions are essentially small, highly-structured programs. A signed assertion, which can be sent over an untrusted network, is also called a `credential assertion.' Credential assertions, which also serve the role of certificates, have the same syntax as policy assertions but are also signed by the principal delegating the trust. For more details on KeyNote, see [BFIK]. This document assumes reader familiarity with the KeyNote system. Cryptographic keys in KeyNote are used to identify principals. To facilitate interoperation between different implementations and to allow for maximal flexibility, keys must be converted to a normalized canonical form (depended on the public key algorithm used) for the purposes of any internal comparisons between keys. For example, an RSA [RSA78] key may be encoded in base64 ASCII in one credential, and in hexadecimal ASCII in another. A KeyNote implementation must internally convert the two encodings to a normalized form that allows for comparison between them. Furthermore, the internal structure of an encoded key must be known for an implementation to correctly decode it. This document specifies RSA and DSA [DSA94] key and signature encodings for use in KeyNote. 2. Key Normalized Forms 2.1 DSA Key Normalized Form DSA keys in KeyNote are identified by four values: - the public value - the p parameter - the q parameter - the g parameter For an explanation of the various parameters, see [AC2]. These four values together make up the DSA key normalized form used in KeyNote. All DSA key comparisons in KeyNote occur between normalized forms. 2.2 RSA Key Normalized Form RSA keys in KeyNote are identified by two values: - the public exponent - the modulus These two values together make up the RSA key normalized form used in KeyNote. All RSA key comparisons in KeyNote occur between normalized forms. 3. Key Encoding 3.1 DSA Key Encoding DSA keys in KeyNote are encoded as an ASN1 SEQUENCE of four ASN1 INTEGER objects. The four INTEGER objects are the public value and the p, q, and g parameters of the DSA key, in that order. For use in KeyNote credentials, the ASN1 SEQUENCE is then ASCII-encoded (e.g., as a string of hex digits or base64 characters). DSA keys encoded in this way in KeyNote must be identified by the "dsa-XXX:" algorithm name, where XXX is an ASCII encoding ("hex" or "base64"). Other ASCII encoding schemes may be defined in the future. 3.2 RSA Key Encoding RSA keys in KeyNote are encoded as an ASN1 SEQUENCE of two ASN1 INTEGER objects. The two INTEGER objects are the public exponent and the modulus of the DSA key, in that order. For use in KeyNote credentials, the ASN1 SEQUENCE is then ASCII-encoded (e.g., as a string of hex digits or base64 characters). RSA keys encoded in this way in KeyNote must be identified by the "rsa-XXX:" algorithm name, where XXX is an ASCII encoding ("hex" or "base64"). Other ASCII encoding schemes may be defined in the future. 4. Signature Computation and Encoding 4.1 DSA Signature Computation and Encoding DSA signatures in KeyNote are computed over the assertion body (starting from the begining of the first keyword, up to and including the newline character immediately before the "Signature:" keyword) and the signature algorithm name (including the trailing colon character, e.g., "sig-dsa-sha1-base64:") DSA signatures are then encoded as an ASN1 SEQUENCE of two ASN1 INTEGER objects. The two INTEGER objects are the r and s values of a DSA signature [AC2]. For use in KeyNote credentials, the ASN1 SEQUENCE is then ASCII-encoded (as a string of hex digits or base64 characters). DSA signatures encoded in this way in KeyNote must be identified by the "sig-dsa-XXX-YYY:" algorithm name, where XXX is a hash function name ("sha1", for the SHA1 [SHA1] hash function is currently the only hash function that may be used with DSA) and YYY is an ASCII encoding ("hex" or "base64"). 4.2 RSA Signature Computation and Encoding RSA signatures in KeyNote are computed over the assertion body (starting from the begining of the first keyword, up to and including the newline character immediately before the "Signature:" keyword) and the signature algorithm name (including the trailing colon character, e.g., "sig-rsa-sha1-base64:") RSA signatures are then encoded as an ASN1 OCTET STRING object, containing the signature value. For use in KeyNote credentials, the ASN1 OCTET STRING is then ASCII-encoded (as a string of hex digits or base64 characters). RSA signatures encoded in this way in KeyNote must be identified by the "sig-rsa-XXX-YYY:" algorithm name, where XXX is a hash function name ("md5" or "sha1", for the MD5 [MD5] and SHA1 [SHA1] hash algorithms respectively, may be used with RSA) and YYY is an ASCII encoding ("hex" or "base64"). 5. Security Considerations This document discusses the format of RSA and DSA keys and signatures as used in KeyNote. The security of KeyNote credentials utilizing such keys and credentials is directly dependent on the strength of the related public key algorithms. On the security of KeyNote itself, see [BFIK]. 6. IANA Considerations Per [BFIK], IANA should provide a registry of reserved algorithm identifiers. The following identifiers are reserved by this document as public key encodings: - "rsa-hex" - "rsa-base64" - "dsa-hex" - "dsa-base64" The following identifiers are reserved by this document as signature encodings: - "sig-rsa-md5-hex" - "sig-rsa-md5-base64" - "sig-rsa-sha1-hex" - "sig-rsa-sha1-base64" - "sig-dsa-sha1-hex" - "sig-dsa-sha1-base64" References [AC2] Bruce Schneier, Applied Cryptography 2nd Edition, John Wiley & Sons, New York, NY, 1996. [BFIK] M. Blaze, J. Feigenbaum, J. Ioannidis, A D. Keromytis, "The KeyNote Trust-Management System Version 2", RFC 2704, September 1999. [DSA94] NIST, FIPS PUB 186, "Digital Signature Standard", May 1994. [MD5] Rivest, R., "The MD5 Message-Digest Algorithm", RFC 1321, MIT and RSA Data Security, Inc., April 1992. [RSA78] R. L. Rivest, A. Shamir, L. M. Adleman, "A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems", Communications of the ACM, v21n2. pp 120-126, February 1978. [SHA1] NIST, FIPS PUB 180-1, "Secure Hash Standard", April 1995. http://csrc.nist.gov/fips/fip180-1.txt (ascii) http://csrc.nist.gov/fips/fip180-1.ps (postscript) Contacts Comments about this document should be discussed on the keynote-users@nsa.research.att.com mailing list. Questions about this document can also be directed to the authors as a group at the keynote@research.att.com alias, or to the individual authors at: Matt Blaze John Ioannidis mab@research.att.com ji@research.att.com AT&T Labs - Research 180 Park Avenue Florham Park, New Jersey 07932-0000 Angelos D. Keromytis angelos@dsl.cis.upenn.edu Distributed Systems Lab CIS Department, University of Pennsylvania 200 S. 33rd Street Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-6389 Full Copyright Statement Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1999). All Rights Reserved. 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