CDNI delegation using Automated Certificate Management Environment

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction

Content delivery over HTTPS using two or more cooperating Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) along the path requires credential management, specifically when DNS-based redirection is used. In such cases, an upstream CDN (uCDN) needs to delegate its credentials to a downstream (dCDN) for content delivery.¶

[RFC9115] defines delegation methods that allow a uCDN on behalf of the content provider, the holder of the domain, to generate on-demand an X.509 certificate that binds the designated domain name with a key-pair owned by the dCDN. For further details, please refer to Section 1 of [RFC9115] and Section 5.1.2.1 of [RFC9115].¶

This document defines CDNI Metadata to make use of HTTPS delegation between a uCDN and a dCDN based on the mechanism specified in [RFC9115]. Furthermore, it adds a delegation method to the "CDNI Payload Types" IANA registry.¶

Section 1.1 defines terminology used in this document. Section 2 presents delegation metadata for the FCI interface. Section 3 addresses the metadata for handling HTTPS delegation with the Metadata Interface. Section 4 addresses IANA registry for delegation methods. Section 5 covers the security considerations.¶

2. Advertising Delegation Metadata for CDNI through FCI

The Footprint and Capabilities Advertisement interface (FCI) defined in [RFC8008] allows a dCDN to send a FCI capability type object to a uCDN.¶

The FCI.Metadata object allows a dCDN to advertise the capabilities regarding the supported delegation methods and their configuration.¶

The following is an example of the supported delegated methods capability object for a dCDN implementing the ACME delegation method.¶

{
  "capabilities": [
    {
      "capability-type": "FCI.Metadata",
      "capability-value": {
        "metadata": [
          "ACMEDelegationMethod",
          "... Other supported delegation methods ..."
        ]
      },
      "footprints": [
        "Footprint objects"
      ]
    }
  ]
}

3. ACME Delegation Metadata for CDNI

When a uCDN delegates the delivery of HTTPS traffic to a dCDN using DNS Redirection [RFC7336], the dCDN must use a certificate bound to the origin's name to successfully authenticate to the end-user (see also Section 5.1.2.1 of [RFC9115]).¶

To that end, this section defines the AcmeDelegationMethod object which describes metadata for using the ACME delegation interface [RFC9115].¶

The ACMEDelegationMethod applies to both ACME STAR delegation, which provides a delegation model based on short-term certificates with automatic renewal (Section 2.3.2 of [RFC9115]), and non-STAR delegation, which allows delegation between CDNs using long-term certificates Section 2.3.3 of [RFC9115].¶

Figure 1 provides a high-level view of the combined CDNI and ACME delegation message flows to obtain STAR certificate bound to the origin's name.¶

Section 3.1 defines the objects used for bootstrapping the ACME delegation method between a uCDN and a delegate dCDN.¶

{
  "generic-metadata-type": "MI.ACMEDelegationMethod",
  "generic-metadata-value": {
    "acme-delegation": "https://acme.ucdn.example/delegation/ogfr",
    "time-window": {
      "start": 1665417434,
      "end": 1665676634
    },
    "star-lifetime": 345600,
    "star-lifetime-adjust": 259200
  }
}

{
  "generic-metadata-type": "MI.ACMEDelegationMethod",
  "generic-metadata-value": {
    "acme-delegation": "https://acme.ucdn.example/delegation/wSi5",
    "time-window": {
      "start": 1570982234,
      "end": 1665417434
    }
  }
}

4. IANA Considerations

This document requests the registration of the following entry under the "CDNI Payload Types" registry:¶

RFC Editor: please replace RFCthis with the RFC number of this RFC and remove this note.¶

5. Security Considerations

The metadata object defined in this document does not introduce any new security or privacy concerns over those already discussed in [RFC9115], [RFC8006] and [RFC8008].¶

The reader is expected to understand the ACME delegation trust model (Section 7.1 of [RFC9115]) and security goal (Section 7.2 of [RFC9115]), in particular the criticality around the protection of the user account associated with the delegation, which authorizes all the security relevant operations between dCDN and uCDN over the ACME channel. The dCDN's ACME account is also relevant to the privacy of the entire scheme; for example, the acme-delegation resource in the Metadata object is only accessible to the holder of the account key, who is allowed to fetch its content exclusively via POST-as-GET (Section 2.3.1.2 of [RFC9115]).¶

In addition, the Metadata interface authentication and confidentiality requirements defined in Section 8 of [RFC8006] MUST be followed.¶

Implementers MUST adhere to the security considerations defined in the CDNI Request Routing: Footprint and Capabilities Semantics, Section 7 of [RFC8008].¶

When TLS is used to achieve the above security objectives, the general TLS usage guidance in [RFC9325] MUST be followed.¶

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank authors of the [RFC9115], Antonio Augustin Pastor Perales, Diego Lopez, Thomas Fossati and Yaron Sheffer. Additionally, our gratitude to Thomas Fossati who participated in the drafting, reviewing and giving his feedback in finalizing this document. We also thank CDNI co-chair Kevin Ma for his continual review and feedback during the development of this document.¶

Authors' Addresses