ACE - Authentication and Authorization of Constrained Environments

WorkingGroup

About

The IETF has recently developed protocols for use in constrained environments, where network nodes are limited in CPU, memory and power. REST architecture is widely used for such constrained environments. It has been observed that Internet protocols can be applied to these constrained environments, often only requiring minor tweaking and profiling. In other cases, new protocols have been defined to address the specific requirements of constrained environments. An example of such a protocol is the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP).

As in other environments, authentication and authorization questions also arise in constrained environments. For example, a door lock has to authorize the person seeking access using a "digital key". Where is the authorization policy stored? How does the digital key communicate with the lock? Does the lock interact with an authorization server to obtain authorization information? How can access be temporarily granted to other persons? How can access be revoked? These types of questions have been answered by existing protocols for use cases outside constrained environments, however in constrained environments, additional and different requirements pose challenges for the use of various security protocols. In particular, the need arises for a dynamic and fine grained access control mechanism, where clients and/or resource servers are constrained.

The IETF has a long history in developing three-party authentication and authorization protocols for distributed environments. Examples include Kerberos, the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), the Authentication, Authorization and Accounting (AAA) infrastructure, and the Web Authorization Protocol (OAuth). All these protocols enjoy widespread deployment on the Internet. Although they all aim to solve a similar goal, at an abstract level, they offer quite different functions and utilize different message exchanges. These differences result from the main deployment use cases they were designed for respectively.

Requirements derived from use cases may indicate that existing work is useful as basis for a solution for constrained environments. These protocols, however, were not optimized for constrained environments. Additional requirements that need to be taken into account are the lack of a suitable user-interface and the inability of embedded devices to contact an authorization server in real-time with every resource access request due to intermittent connectivity, etc.

This working group therefore aims to produce a standardized solution for authentication and authorization to enable authorized access (Get, Put, Post, Delete) to resources identified by a URI and hosted on a resource server in constrained environments. As a starting point, the working group will assume that access to resources at a resource server by a client device takes place using CoAP and is protected by DTLS. Both resource server and client may be constrained. This access will be mediated by an authorization server, which is not considered to be constrained.

Existing authentication and authorization protocols will be evaluated and used where applicable to build the constrained-environment solution. This requires relevant specifications to be reviewed for suitability, selecting a subset of them and restricting the options within each of the specifications. Some functionality, however, may not be available in existing protocols, in which case the solution may also involve new protocol work. Leveraging existing work means the working group benefits from available security analysis, implementation, and deployment experience. Moreover, a standardized solution for federated authentication and authorization will help to stimulate the deployment of constrained devices that provide increased security.

Once progress in identifying suitable candidate solutions has been made, the working group will verify whether the same mechanisms are also applicable beyond the use of CoAP and DTLS, which are the two main protocols the group will focus on for access to resources. In particular, the ability to use the developed solution over HTTP and TLS will be investigated. Note that the initial focus is on CoAP and HTTP with DTLS and TLS. Other security protocols may be considered as long as the primary focus is maintained. The group is scoped to work only on the web protocols and data carried within them. Furthermore, to guarantee smooth transition, the integration with existing deployments will be studied, particularly concerning the use of protocol translation proxies.

This work does not make the assumption that the party offering application layer services is always the same party offering network access services. ACE will need to interact with CORE and LWIG to ensure coordination.

The working group has the following tasks:

1. Produce use cases and requirements

2. Identify authentication and authorization mechanisms suitable for

resource access in constrained environments.

Category

Specification Work

Organization For Group