RFC 5386
Better-Than-Nothing Security: An Unauthenticated Mode of IPsec
Better-Than-Nothing Security: An Unauthenticated Mode of IPsec 🦋
Okay bestie, this is RFC 5386 and it's giving standards track 💅. It's from the Network Working Group, published November 2008 🎀. The authors are N. Williams (Sun) and M. Richardson (SSW). The title block doesn't list any Obsoletes or Updates entries, so it isn't replacing or patching anything else 🌸.
Status of This Memo ✨
This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements. Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state and status of this protocol. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
Copyright Notice 🌈
Copyright (c) 2008 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document.
Abstract 💖
This document explains how to use the Internet Key Exchange (IKE) protocols, like IKEv1 and IKEv2, to set up "unauthenticated" security associations (SAs) for use with the IPsec Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP) and the IPsec Authentication Header (AH). No changes to IKEv2 bits-on-the-wire are needed, but Peer Authorization Database (PAD) and Security Policy Database (SPD) extensions are specified. Unauthenticated IPsec is called by its popular acronym, "BTNS" (Better-Than-Nothing Security) 🫶.
Table of Contents 📖
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.1. Conventions Used in This Document . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. BTNS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. Usage Scenarios . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.1. Example #1: A Security Gateway . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.2. Example #2: A Mixed End-System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.3. Example #3: A BTNS-Only System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
3.4. Miscellaneous Comments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
4. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
4.1. Connection Latching and Channel Binding . . . . . . . . . 9
4.2. Leap-of-Faith (LoF) for BTNS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
5. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
6. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
6.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
6.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101. Introduction ✨
Okay so here's the vibe: this doc shows how to set up unauthenticated IPsec SAs using IKEv2 [RFC4306] and unauthenticated public keys. No new on-the-wire protocol elements get added to IKEv2, which is honestly iconic 🧚.
The [RFC4301] processing model is assumed 💅.
This document does not define an opportunistic BTNS mode of IPsec, where nodes can fall back to unprotected IP when their peers don't support IKEv2. It also doesn't describe "leap-of-faith" modes or "connection latching" 🙈.
See [RFC5387] for the applicability and uses of BTNS and definitions of these terms 📚.
This document describes BTNS in terms of IKEv2 and [RFC4301]'s concepts. There's no reason the same methods can't be used with IKEv1 [RFC2408], [RFC2409], and [RFC2401]. However, those specifications don't include the PAD concepts, so it may not be possible to implement BTNS on all compliant RFC2401 implementations 🥲.
1.1. Conventions Used in This Document 🎀
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] 🔥.
2. BTNS 💜
The IPsec processing model gets a glow-up in these ways:
- A new ID type is added: 'PUBLICKEY'. IDs of this type have public keys as their values. This ID type is not used on the wire 🔑.
- PAD entries that match on PUBLICKEY IDs are called "BTNS PAD entries". All other PAD entries are called "non-BTNS PAD entries" 🍓.
- BTNS PAD entries may match on specific peer PUBLICKEY IDs (or public key fingerprints) or on all peer public keys. The latter is called the "wildcard BTNS PAD entry" 🌈.
- BTNS PAD entries MUST logically (see below) follow all other PAD entries (the PAD being an ordered list) 📋.
- At most one wildcard BTNS PAD entry may appear in the PAD, and, if present, MUST be the last entry in the PAD (see below) ⭐.
- Any peer that uses an IKEv2 AUTH method involving a digital signature (made with a private key to a public key cryptosystem) may match a BTNS PAD entry, as long as it matches no non-BTNS PAD entries. Suitable AUTH methods as of August 2007 are: RSA Digital Signature (method #1) and DSS Digital Signature (method #3); see [RFC4306], Section 3.8 ✍️.
- A BTNS-capable implementation of IPsec will first search the PAD for non-BTNS entries matching a peer's ID. If no matching non-BTNS PAD entries are found, then the peer's ID MUST be coerced to be of 'PUBLICKEY' type with the peer's public key as its value. The PAD is then searched again for matching BTNS PAD entries. This makes sure BTNS PAD entries logically follow non-BTNS PAD entries. A single PAD search that keeps these semantics is allowed 🔍.
- A peer that matches a BTNS PAD entry is called a "BTNS peer". Such a peer is "authenticated" by verifying the signature in its IKEv2 AUTH payload with the public key from the peer's CERT payload 🫶.
- Of course, if no matching PAD entry is found, then the IKE SA is rejected as usual 🙅.
- A new flag for SPD entries: 'BTNS_OK'. Traffic to and from peers that match the BTNS PAD entry will only match SPD entries that have the BTNS_OK flag set. The SPD may be searched by address or by ID (of type PUBLICKEY for BTNS peers), per the IPsec processing model [RFC4301]. Searching by ID in this case requires creating SPD entries that are bound to public key values. This could be used to build "leap-of-faith" [RFC5387] behavior (see Section 4.2), for example 🕵️♀️.
Nodes MUST reject IKE_SA proposals from peers that match non-BTNS PAD entries but fail to authenticate properly 🚫.
Nodes that want to be treated as BTNS nodes by their peers MUST include bare public key CERT payloads. Right now only bare RSA public key CERT payloads are defined, which means BTNS only works with RSA public keys at this time (see "Raw RSA Key" in Section 3.6 of [RFC4306]). Nodes MAY also include any number of certificates that bind the same public key. These certificates don't need to be pre-shared with their peers (for example, because they're ephemeral and self-signed) 🎀. RSA keys for use in BTNS may be generated at any time, but connection latching [ConnLatch] requires that they stay constant between IKEv2 exchanges that are used to set up SAs for latched connections 🔒.
To keep standard IPsec access control semantics intact:
- BTNS PAD entries MUST logically follow all non-BTNS PAD entries,
- the wildcard BTNS PAD entry MUST be the last entry in the PAD, logically, and
- the wildcard BTNS PAD entry MUST have ID constraints that do not logically overlap those of other PAD entries 👑.
As described above, the logical PAD ordering requirements are easy to implement by searching the PAD twice at peer authentication time: once using the peer-asserted ID, and if that fails, once using the peer's public key as a PUBLICKEY ID. A single pass implementation that meets this requirement is permitted 🧠.
The BTNS entry ID constraint non-overlap requirement is also easy to implement by searching the PAD twice: once when BTNS peers authenticate, and again when BTNS peers negotiate child SAs. In the first pass, the PAD is searched for a matching PAD entry as described above. In the second, it's searched to make sure that BTNS peers' asserted child SA traffic selectors don't conflict with non-BTNS PAD entries. Single pass implementations that preserve these semantics are feasible 💅✨.
3. Usage Scenarios 🧚
To explain the above rules, a bunch of scenarios will be looked at. The goal is to convince you that the above rules are both sufficient and necessary 🥰.
This section is informative only 📝.
To walk through the scenarios, we'll use a reference diagram of an example network. Here it is 🗺️:
[Q] [R]
AS1 . . AS2
[A]----+----[SG-A].......+....+.......[SG-B]-------[B]
...... \
..PI.. ----[btns-B]
......
[btns-C].....+....+.......[btns-D]
Figure 1: Reference Network DiagramIn this diagram, there are eight systems 🤯. Six of them are end-nodes (A, B, C, D, Q, and R). Two are security gateways (SG-A, SG-B) protecting the networks that [A] and [B] live on. Node [Q] is IPsec and BTNS capable. Node [R] is a simple node with no IPsec or BTNS capability. Nodes [C] and [D] are BTNS capable 💖.
Nodes [C] and [Q] have fixed addresses. Node [D] has a non-fixed address 📍.
We'll look at how these various nodes talk to node [SG-A], and/or how [SG-A] rejects communications with some of them. In the first example, we check things out from [SG-A]'s point of view. In the second example, we look from [Q]'s point of view. In the third example, we look from [C]'s point of view 👀.
PI is the Public Internet ("The Wild") 🌍🦋.
3.1. Example #1: A Security Gateway ✨
Okay so the main character of this example is [SG-A] 🔥, a firewall device of some kind that we want to set up to respond to BTNS connections from [C] 💅.
[SG-A] has these PAD and SPD entries 🎀:
Child SA
Rule Remote ID IDs allowed SPD Search by
---- --------- ----------- -------------
1 <B's ID> <B's network> by-IP
2 <Q's ID> <Q's host> by-IP
3 PUBLICKEY:any ANY by-IPFigure 2: [SG-A] PAD Table
The last entry is the BTNS entry 🦋.
Note that [SG-A]'s PAD entry has one and only one wildcard PAD entry: the BTNS catch-all PAD entry as the last entry, as described in Section 2. Iconic, no notes 💅.
<Child SA IDs allowed> and <SPD Search by> are from [RFC4301], Section 4.4.3.
Rule Local Remote Next Layer BTNS Action
addr addr Protocol ok
---- ----- ------ ---------- ---- -----------------------
1 [A] [R] ANY N/A BYPASS
2 [A] [Q] ANY no PROTECT(ESP,tunnel,AES,
SHA256)
3 [A] B-net ANY no PROTECT(ESP,tunnel,AES,
SHA256)
4 [A] ANY ANY yes PROTECT(ESP,transport,
integr+conf)Figure 3: [SG-A] SPD Table
Here's how [SG-A] handles SA establishment attempts from various peers 🧚:
- [Q] does not match PAD entry #1 but does match PAD entry #2. PAD processing stops, then the SPD is searched by [Q]'s ID to find entry #2. CHILD SAs are then allowed that have [SG-A]'s and [Q]'s addresses as the end-point addresses.
- [SG-B] matches PAD entry #1. PAD processing stops, then the SPD is searched by [SG-B]'s ID to find SPD entry #3. CHILD SAs are then allowed that have [SG-A]'s address and any addresses from B's network as the end-point addresses.
- [R] does not initiate any IKE SAs. Its traffic to [A] is bypassed by SPD entry #1. Not even a little bit of drama 🌸.
- [C] does not match PAD entries #1 or #2 but does match entry #3, the BTNS wildcard PAD entry. The SPD is searched by [C]'s address, and SPD entry #4 is matched. CHILD SAs are then allowed that have [SG-A]'s address and [C]'s address as the end-point addresses, provided that [C]'s address is neither [Q]'s nor any of [B]'s (see Section 2). See the last bullet item below.
- A rogue BTNS node attempting to assert [Q]'s or [B]'s addresses will either match the PAD entries for [Q] or [B] and fail to authenticate as [Q] or [B], in which case they are rejected, or they will match PAD entry #3 but will not be allowed to create CHILD SAs with [Q]'s or [B]'s addresses as traffic selectors. Nope, not today, rogue 🙅♀️.
- A rogue BTNS node attempting to establish an SA whereby the rogue node asserts [C]'s address will succeed at establishing such an SA. Protection for [C] requires additional bindings of [C]'s specific BTNS ID (that is, its public key) to its traffic flows through connection latching and channel binding or through leap-of-faith, none of which are described here. ngl this is the lowkey scary part 💀.
3.2. Example #2: A Mixed End-System 🍓
[Q] is an NFSv4 server.
[Q] is a native IPsec implementation, and its NFSv4 implementation is IPsec-aware. Two for two, slay 👑.
[Q] wants to protect all traffic with [A]. [Q] also wants to protect NFSv4 traffic with all peers. Its PAD and SPD are configured as follows:
Child SA
Rule Remote ID IDs allowed SPD Search by
---- --------- ----------- -------------
1 <[A]'s ID> <[A]'s address> by-IP
2 PUBLICKEY:any ANY by-IPFigure 4: [Q] PAD Table
The last entry is the BTNS entry 🦋.
Rule Local Remote Next Layer BTNS Action
addr addr Protocol ok
---- ----- ------ ---------- ---- -----------------------
1 [Q] [A] ANY no PROTECT(ESP,tunnel,AES,
SHA256)
2 [Q] ANY ANY yes PROTECT(ESP,transport,
with integr+conf)
port 2049Figure 5: [Q] SPD Table
The same analysis shown above in Section 3.1 applies here with respect to [SG-A], [C], and rogue peers. The second SPD entry permits any BTNS-capable node to negotiate a port-specific SA to port 2049, the port on which NFSv4 runs. Additionally, [SG-B] is treated as a BTNS peer as it is not known to [Q], and therefore any host behind [SG-B] can access the NFSv4 service on [Q]. As [Q] has no formal relationship with [SG-B], rogues can impersonate [B] (i.e., assert [B]'s addresses). Okay that's a little unhinged energy 🙈.
3.3. Example #3: A BTNS-Only System 🧸
[C] supports only BTNS and wants to use BTNS to protect NFSv4 traffic. Its PAD and SPD are configured as follows:
Child SA
Rule Remote ID IDs allowed SPD Search by
---- --------- ----------- -------------
1 PUBLICKEY:any ANY by-IPThe last (and only) entry is the BTNS entry 🦋.
Figure 6: [Q] PAD Table
Rule Local Remote Next Layer BTNS Action
addr addr Protocol ok
---- ----- ------ ---------- ---- -----------------------
1 [C] ANY ANY yes PROTECT(ESP,transport,
with integr+conf)
port
2049
2 [C] ANY ANY N/A BYPASSFigure 7: [SG-A] SPD Table
The analysis from Section 3.1 applies as follows:
- Communication with [Q] on port 2049 matches SPD entry number 1. This causes [C] to initiate an IKEv2 exchange with [Q]. The PAD entry on [C] causes it to not care what identity [Q] asserts. Further authentication (and channel binding) could occur within the NFSv4 protocol.
- Communication with [A], [B], or any other internet machine (including [Q]) occurs in the clear, so long as it is not on port 2049.
- All analysis about rogue BTNS nodes applies, but they can only assert SAs for port 2049.
3.4. Miscellaneous Comments 🌈
If [SG-A] were not BTNS capable, then it would not have PAD and SPD entries #3 and #4, respectively, in example #1. Then [C] would be rejected as usual under the standard IPsec model [RFC4301].
Similarly, if [Q] were not BTNS capable, then it would not have PAD and SPD entries #2 in example #2. Then [C] would be rejected as usual under the standard IPsec model [RFC4301].
4. Security Considerations 💀🔥
Unauthenticated security association negotiation is subject to man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks and should be used with care. Where security infrastructures are lacking, this may indeed be better than nothing.
Use with applications that bind authentication at higher network layers to secure channels at lower layers may provide one secure way to use unauthenticated IPsec, but this is not specified herein.
The BTNS PAD entry must be last and its child SA ID constraints must be non-overlapping with any other PAD entry, as described in Section 2. This will ensure that no BTNS peer can impersonate another IPsec non-BTNS peer. This part is literally the whole point 🫶.
4.1. Connection Latching and Channel Binding 🔗
BTNS is subject to MITM attacks. One way to protect against MITM attacks subsequent to initial communications is to use "connection latching" [ConnLatch]. In connection latching, upper layer protocols (ULPs) cooperate with IPsec to bind discrete packet flows to sequences of similar SAs. Connection latching requires native IPsec implementations.
MITMs can be detected by using application-layer authentication frameworks and/or mechanisms, such as the GSS-API [RFC2743], with channel binding [RFC5056]. IPsec "channels" are nothing other than latched connections.
4.2. Leap-of-Faith (LoF) for BTNS 🦋
"Leap of faith" is the term generally used when a user accepts the assertion that a given key identifies a peer on the first communication (despite a lack of strong evidence for that assertion), and then remembers this association for future communications. Specifically this is a common mode of operation for Secure Shell [RFC4251] clients. When a server is encountered for the first time, the Secure Shell client may ask the user whether to accept the server's public key. If so, the client records the server's name (as given by the user) and public key in a database.
Leap of faith can work in a similar way for BTNS nodes, but it is currently still being designed and specified by the IETF BTNS WG. Still cooking, bestie 🍳.
5. Acknowledgements 🫶
Thanks to the following reviewer: Stephen Kent.
6. References 📚
6.1. Normative References
[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.
[RFC4301] Kent, S. and K. Seo, "Security Architecture for the
Internet Protocol", RFC 4301, December 2005.6.2. Informative References
[ConnLatch] Williams, N., "IPsec Channels: Connection Latching",
Work in Progress, April 2008.
[RFC2401] Kent, S. and R. Atkinson, "Security Architecture for the
Internet Protocol", RFC 2401, November 1998.
[RFC2408] Maughan, D., Schneider, M., and M. Schertler, "Internet
Security Association and Key Management Protocol
(ISAKMP)", RFC 2408, November 1998.
[RFC2409] Harkins, D. and D. Carrel, "The Internet Key Exchange
(IKE)", RFC 2409, November 1998.
[RFC2743] Linn, J., "Generic Security Service Application Program
Interface Version 2, Update 1", RFC 2743, January 2000.
[RFC4251] Ylonen, T. and C. Lonvick, "The Secure Shell (SSH)
Protocol Architecture", RFC 4251, January 2006.
[RFC4306] Kaufman, C., "Internet Key Exchange (IKEv2) Protocol",
RFC 4306, December 2005.
[RFC5056] Williams, N., "On the Use of Channel Bindings to Secure
Channels", RFC 5056, November 2007.
[RFC5387] Touch, J., Black, D., and Y. Wang, "Problem and
Applicability Statement for Better-Than-Nothing Security
(BTNS)", RFC 5387, November 2008.Authors' Addresses 🎀
Nicolas Williams
Sun Microsystems
5300 Riata Trace Ct
Austin, TX 78727
US
EMail: Nicolas.Williams@sun.com
Michael C. Richardson
Sandelman Software Works
470 Dawson Avenue
Ottawa, ON K1Z 5V7
CA
EMail: mcr@sandelman.ottawa.on.ca
URI: http://www.sandelman.ottawa.on.ca/📦 where this page comes from
- ietf: rfc5386 2008-11
- 💖 girlified by claude-haiku-5-5 on : a language model's rewrite of the original, under its terms