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 (iesg@ietf.org) by January 20. Profiling Use of PKI in IPSEC (pki4ipsec) --------------------------- Current Status: Proposed Working Group DESCRIPTION: IPsec has been standardized for over 5 years, and the use of X.509 certificates have been specified within the IPsec standards for the same time. However, very few IPsec deployments use certificates. One reason is the lack of a clear description of how X.509 certificates should be used with IPsec. Another is the lack of a simple, scalable, and clearly specified way for IPsec systems to obtain certificates and perform other certificate lifecycle operations with PKI systems. THE WG WILL DELIVER: 1) A standards-track document that gives specific instructions on how X.509 certificates should be handled with respect to the IKEv1 and IKEv2 protocols. This document will include a certificate profile, addressing which fields in the certificate should have which values and how those values should be handled. This effort is the WG's primary priority. 2) An informational document identifying and describing requirements for a profile of a certificate management protocol to handle PKI enrolment as well as certificate lifecycle interactions between IPsec VPN systems and PKI systems. Enrolment is defined as certificate request and retrieval. Certificate lifecycle interactions is defined as certificate renewals/changes, revocation, validation, and repository lookups. These requirements will be designed so that they meet the needs of enterprise scale IPsec VPN deployments. Once the above to items enter WG last call, we will begin work on: 3) A standards-track document describing a detailed profile of the CMC protocol that meets the requirements laid out in the requirements document. Profile documents for other enrolment and/or management protocols may also be created. SCOPE The working group will focus on the needs of enterprise scale IPsec VPN deployments. Gateway-to-gateway access (tunnel mode) and end-user remote access to a gateway (either tunnel or transport mode) are both in scope. NON-GOALS User-to-user IPsec connections will be considered, but are not explicitly in scope. We will consider the requirements for this scenario only until doing so significantly slows the progress of the explicitly scoped items, at which point it will be dropped. Specification of communications between an IPsec administrative function and IPsec systems is explicitly out of scope. Purely PKI to PKI issues will not be addressed. Cross-certification will not be addressed. Long term non-repudiation will also not be addressed.
