RFC5967

Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) S. Turner Request for Comments: 5967 IECA Updates: 2986 August 2010 Category: Informational ISSN: 2070-1721

               The application/pkcs10 Media Type

Abstract

This document specifies a media type used to carry PKCS #10 certification requests as defined in RFC 2986. It carries over the original specification from RFC 2311, which recently has been moved to Historic status, and properly links it to RFC 2986.

Status of This Memo

This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is published for informational purposes.

This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It represents the consensus of the IETF community. It has received public review and has been approved for publication by the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). Not all documents approved by the IESG are a candidate for any level of Internet Standard; see Section 2 of RFC 5741.

Information about the current status of this document, any errata, and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5967.

Copyright Notice

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This document may contain material from IETF Documents or IETF Contributions published or made publicly available before November 10, 2008. The person(s) controlling the copyright in some of this material may not have granted the IETF Trust the right to allow modifications of such material outside the IETF Standards Process. Without obtaining an adequate license from the person(s) controlling the copyright in such materials, this document may not be modified outside the IETF Standards Process, and derivative works of it may not be created outside the IETF Standards Process, except to format it for publication as an RFC or to translate it into languages other than English.

Introduction

RFC2311 first defined the application/pkcs10 media type. When RFC2633 was published, the application/pkcs10 section was dropped, but for some reason the text was not incorporated into the PKCS #10 document RFC2986. RFC2311 was moved to Historic status by RFC5751. To ensure the IANA media type registration points to a non-Historic document, this document updates RFC2986 with the definition of the application/pkcs10 media type and an IANA registration based on RFC4288.

The text for Section 2 is adapted from Section 3.7 of RFC2311.

Requirements Terminology

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC2119.

Creating a Certification Request

A typical application that allows a user to generate cryptographic information has to submit that information to a Certification Authority (CA), who transforms it into a certificate. PKCS #10 RFC2986 describes a syntax for certification requests.

The details of certification requests and the process of obtaining a certificate are beyond the scope of this memo. Instead, only the format of data used in application/pkcs10 is defined.

Format of the application/pkcs10 Body

PKCS #10 defines the ASN.1 type CertificationRequest for use in submitting a certification request. For transfer to a CA, this abstract syntax needs to be encoded and identified in a unique

manner. When the media type application/pkcs10 is used, the body MUST be a CertificationRequest.

A robust application SHOULD output Distinguished Encoding Rules (DER), but allow Basic Encoding Rules (BER) or DER on input.

Data produced by BER or DER is 8-bit, but some transports are limited to 7-bit data. In such cases, a suitable 7-bit transfer encoding MUST be applied; in MIME-compatible transports, the base64 encoding RFC4648 SHOULD be used with application/pkcs10, although any 7-bit transfer encoding may work.

Sending and Receiving an application/pkcs10 Body Part

For sending a certificate-signing request, the application/pkcs10 message format MUST be used to convey a PKCS #10 certificate-signing request. Note that for sending certificates and Certificate Revocation Lists (CRLs) without any signed content, the application/pkcs7-mime message format MUST be used to convey a degenerate PKCS #7 signedData "certs-only" message RFC5751.

To send an application/pkcs10 body, the application generates the cryptographic information for the user. The details of the cryptographic information are beyond the scope of this memo.

Step 1. The cryptographic information is placed within a PKCS #10

       CertificationRequest.

Step 2. The CertificationRequest is encoded according to BER or DER

       (preferred, DER).

Step 3. As a typical step, the encoded CertificationRequest is also

       base64 encoded so that it is 7-bit data suitable for transfer
       in ESMTP.  This then becomes the body of an
       application/pkcs10 body part.

The result might look like this:

  Content-Type: application/pkcs10; name=smime.p10
  Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
  Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=smime.p10

  rfvbnj756tbBghyHhHUujhJhjH77n8HHGT9HG4VQpfyF467GhIGfHfYT6
  7n8HHGghyHhHUujhJh4VQpfyF467GhIGfHfYGTrfvbnjT6jH7756tbB9H
  f8HHGTrfvhJhjH776tbB9HG4VQbnj7567GhIGfHfYT6ghyHhHUujpfyF4
  0GhIGfHfQbnj756YT64V

A typical application only needs to send a certification request. It is a Certification Authority that has to receive and process the request. The steps for recovering the CertificationRequest from the message are straightforward but are not presented here. The procedures for processing the certification request are beyond the scope of this document.

IANA Considerations

IANA has updated the registration for the application/pkcs10 media subtype in the Application Media Types registry using the filled-in template from BCP 13 RFC4288 given below.

Registration of Media Subtype application/pkcs10

The media subtype for a PKCS #10 certification request is application/pkcs10.

  Type name: application

  Subtype name: pkcs10

  Required parameters: None

  Optional parameters: None

  Encoding considerations: binary; see Section 2.

  Security considerations:

     Clients use a certification request to request that a
     Certification Authority certify a public key.  The
     certification request is digitally signed.  Also, see
     Section 6.

  Interoperability considerations: See Section 2.

  Published specification: This specification.

  Applications which use this media type:

     Applications that support PKCS #10 certification requests
     RFC2986.

  Additional information:

     Magic number(s): None
     File extension(s): .p10

     Macintosh File Type Code(s):

  Person & email address to contact for further information:
    Sean Turner <[email protected]>

  Restrictions on usage: none

  Author: Sean Turner <[email protected]>

  Intended usage: COMMON

  Change controller: The IESG

Security Considerations

The security considerations of RFC2986 and RFC5751 apply; no new security considerations are introduced by this document.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the authors of RFC 2311, Steve Dusse, Paul Hoffman, Blake Ramsdell, Laurence Lundblade, and Lisa Repka.

I would also like to thank Bjoern Hoehrmann for his review of the media subtype application.

References

Normative References

RFC2119 Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate

          Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.

RFC2986 Nystrom, M. and B. Kaliski, "PKCS #10: Certification

          Request Syntax Specification Version 1.7", RFC 2986,
          November 2000.

RFC4288 Freed, N. and J. Klensin, "Media Type Specifications and

          Registration Procedures", BCP 13, RFC 4288, December 2005.

RFC4648 Josefsson, S., "The Base16, Base32, and Base64 Data

          Encodings", RFC 4648, October 2006.

RFC5751 Ramsdell, B. and S. Turner, "Secure/Multipurpose Internet

          Mail Extensions (S/MIME) Version 3.2 Message
          Specification", RFC 5751, January 2010.

[X.690] ITU-T Recommendation X.690 (2002) | ISO/IEC 8825-1:2002.

          Information Technology - ASN.1 encoding rules:
          Specification of Basic Encoding Rules (BER), Canonical
          Encoding Rules (CER) and Distinguished Encoding Rules
          (DER).

Informative References

RFC2311 Dusse, S., Hoffman, P., Ramsdell, B., Lundblade, L., and

          L. Repka, "S/MIME Version 2 Message Specification", RFC
          2311, March 1998.

RFC2633 Ramsdell, B., Ed., "S/MIME Version 3 Message

          Specification", RFC 2633, June 1999.

Author's Address

Sean Turner IECA, Inc. 3057 Nutley Street, Suite 106 Fairfax, VA 22031 USA

EMail: [email protected]