TPS External Registration Group Certificates - dogtagpki/pki GitHub Wiki

Support for Group Certificates

Introduction

There may exist a need for a group of people to share an encryption certificate. This design proposes one way of doing it. The goal is to provide an easy to use mechanism to generate group certs/keys; Members of the group will "recover" them at their next enrollment. Some ideas have been kicked around. One is Auto-generation of "first" token and auto-population of its certsToAdd data to other members of the group. However, it could be problematic. For example:

  • Have to determine who is first when multiple users are enrolling - how to eliminate such window?

  • if we solved issue 1 above, do the other externalReg recovery ops hang and wait, or proceed without recovering any, or fail with error while waiting? How do we know when to do what?

  • maintenance. With the data populated to all members of the group, any change to the group certificate will have to be propagated to all members.

  • etc.

Proposal

This design proposes:

  • make generating the "group cert" a separate step

  • TPS will provide a per-group entry for a "group certsToAdd" entry. Upon enrollment via externalReg, the enrolling user’s personal certsToAdd entry will be concatenated with the group certToAdd entry. This eliminates the need to populate certsToAdd administering the group certsToAdd is much simplier

Assumption

  • The members of the each group has something like "memberOf' ldap attribute in each user record.

  • A user could belong to multiple groups; and multiple "group certsToAdd" coule be applied to each user enrollment

On CA

  • Create a group enrollment profile for encryption certs only. e.g. tokenGroupEncCertProfile.cfg, it is for initiating the enrollment of a group cert that can be later used to "recover" using the externalReg mechanism.

    • we could add a new profilie input to take group name for group enrollment

    • we could add a new authz evaluator to compare the group input to see if its one of the actual authenticating user memberOf list of groups

    • we could make the profile take the group info to be applied in the subject dn

On TPS

  • provide a "group record" in TPS db associated with each group where we could add a group "certsToAdd" attribute

  • modify TPS externalReg code so that during each user enrollment it will pull and "recover" the certs/keys in both

    • group "certsToAdd" (multiple groups allowed)

    • user "certsToAdd"

Advantages

  • Since the group certs/keys info are centralized in one single location, no propagation needed

  • maintenance of the group certs is much easier, not having to touch all user records when group certs are updated

  • if a user belongs to multiple groups, this should work as well

Procedure (flow)

  • A designated member of each group goes through enrollment via the tokenGroupEncCertProfile to enroll a certificate and have its private key escrowed with kra.

  • TPS admin runs ldapmodify to add the certsToAdd attribute with the new group cert and keyid info to the "group record" certsToAdd attribute

  • when a user enrolls his/her token, both user record and group record will be pulled for a concatenated certs to add list in TPS memory for further processing

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