From: Jonathan M. Smith [mailto:jms@central.cis.upenn.edu] Sent: Thursday, June 29, 2000 11:16 PM To: angelos@dsl.cis.upenn.edu; ghwood@internet2.edu; jms@central.cis.upenn.edu; kostas@terena.nl Subject: proposal ``Scalable Trust Management for Internet2'' June 29, 2000 Principal Investigators: Jonathan M. Smith (jms@cis.upenn.edu) Angelos D. Keromytis (angelos@cis.upenn.edu) 200 S. 33rd Street Moore Building, DSL 102E Distributed Systems Lab CIS Department University of Pennsylvania Tel: (215) 573 3639 Fax: (215) 573 2232 1.0 Research Intent "Trust management", introduced in the PolicyMaker system, is a unified approach to specifying and interpreting security policies, credentials, and relationships; it allows direct authorization of security-critical actions. A trust-management system provides standard, general-purpose mechanisms for specifying application security policies and credentials. Trust-management credentials describe a specific delegation of trust and subsume the role of public key certificates; unlike traditional certificates, which bind keys to names, credentials can bind keys directly to the authorization to perform specific tasks. Trust management unifies the notions of security policy, credentials, access control, and authorization. An application that uses a trust-management system can simply ask the compliance checker whether a requested action should be allowed. Furthermore, policies and credentials are written in standard languages that are shared by all trust-managed applications; the security configuration mechanism for one application carries exactly the same syntactic and semantic structure as that of another, even when the semantics of the applications themselves are quite different. KeyNote is a simple and flexible trust-management system designed to work well for a variety of large- and small-scale Internet-based applications. It provides a single, unified language for both local policies and credentials. KeyNote policies and credentials, called `assertions', contain predicates that describe the trusted actions permitted by the holders of specific public keys. KeyNote assertions are essentially small, highly-structured programs. A signed assertion, which can be sent over an untrusted network, is also called a `credential assertion'. Credential assertions, which also serve the role of certificates, have the same syntax as policy assertions but are also signed by the principal delegating the trust. We have incorporated KeyNote in a number of different applications, ranging from IPsec key-management daemons (ISAKMP) to web servers (Apache), information-sharing systems, active network nodes, and electronic payment systems, and thus have a good set of basic applications to experiment with. Several commercial efforts are underway using KeyNote for various aspects of access control. We believe the trust-management approach is much more powerful than traditional PKI attempts, as it allows very fine-grained access control and highly-decentralized management. Given the advanced nature of applications envisioned in Internet2 and the scalability requirements, a model more powerful than simple identity verification is needed for access control and security policy. As part of the DARPA-funded STRONGMAN project, we are working on unifying management of systems controlled by KeyNote through a high-level policy language and appropriate distribution/revocation mechanism(s). 2.0 What we intend to do for Internet2 A major challenge in the Internet2 effort will be the scale of the resulting system, in numbers of nodes, performance, geography and administrative boundaries. Our experience with the STRONGMAN system, which takes the stance of compiled Policy Expression Languages as an approach to application centered use of KeyNote, has been that scalability is most directly a function of what can be "automated" in a system, and for the largest scale systems, what can be rescued from centralized and hierarchical management models. As part of the Internet2 PKI Labs project, we intend to experimentally (meaning we will create, design, implement, share and report on): issues relating to coordination and cooperation of large autonomous systems utilizing an infrastructure such as we have developed. These include: - delegation (and scoping) - revocation - credential discovery and distribution - automated credential issuance and renewal We believe that identifying the tasks which require autonomy and automation can be accomplished for Internet2, and that technological means can be developed for these tasks, either together or individually. Our implementations are intended to be portable, but will likely appear first in OpenBSD and other similar open source systems. We will provide implemented systems as open source in order to maximize their impact on the open source community. For an example of this, see http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~keynote; several hundred sites have downloaded the software and we are aware of tens (of commercial sites) where it is actually in use. 3.0 Existing Infrastructure The Distributed Systems Laboratory at Penn uses RISC workstations from Compaq and Silicon Graphics. There is a 4-processor SGI Challenge-L, which is equipped with 250 MHz MIPS R4400 processors, 512MB of memory, and 16 GB of high performance disk on 4 separate disks. Several high-performance SGI Indigo workstations complement the multi-processor, they are equipped with 250 MHz MIPS R4400 processors and ample memory. The lab also has clusters of multi-homed PC-workstations, largely 300MHz Pentium-II's with 256MBs of EDO memory, as well as a single HP Netserver LS 4-processor P166 with dual PCI buses and 512MB of memory. Many individual PC class machines are used in small experiments; these range in speed to 800 Mhz. DSL machines are interconnected with 10/100 Mbps Ethernet and 155 Mbps ATM. The ATM infrastructure consists of Fore ASX-200 switches linked by fiber; attachment of the hosts is achieved with UTP5. The University of Pennsylvania is part of the Internet2 effort. 4.0 Personnel J. M. Smith is a Professor of CIS, EE & Systems. He was a co-PI on the AURORA gigabit testbed project. He is an editor for several journals and a Senior Member of the IEEE. He has previously worked for Boeing Aerospace, Bell Laboratories, and Bellcore. He has been investigating programmable network infrastructures since 1994 in the DARPA-funded Penn/Bellcore ``Protocol Boosters'' project, and more recently the Penn/Bellcore SwitchWare Active Nets project and the Penn/AT&T Research STRONGMAN active boundary controllers project. He has NSF grants supporting research in Resource-Controlled Active Networking Environments and a Global Active IP Network, in which he collaborates with a Pan-European/Japanese team of collaborators to construct a global IP network controlled by active network elements. A. D. Keromytis is a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania, advised by Jonathan Smith. He has been involved in the development of the IP Security standards since 1995 and has been the author and co-author of a number of implementations. As part of the DARPA-funded SwitchWare project, he co-designed and implemented the Secure Active Networks Environment (SANE) architecture with. He is a co-designer and implementor of the KeyNote trust-management system, and has recently been working on the Penn/AT&T Research STRONGMAN active boundary controllers project. He is also the author of the architecture draft for the IP Security Policy Working Group in the IETF. Other work in progress involves transparent and distributed firewalls (the latter is in collaboration with Steve Bellovin, AT&T Labs). Our team has a history of successfully advancing computer and network security research. Successes of team members include key-agile encryptors for gigabit ATM networks, design and development of different network security mechanisms, secure remote invocation for Active Networks, and design/implementations of trust management systems and IPsec. The members have both independently (in the context of various projects) and collaboratively given thought and implemented systems in distributed system security and network security policy handling over an extended period of time. As we collaborate with members of AT&T Shannon Labs (Matt Blaze and John Ioannidis, Secure Systems Department) on a regular basis, we believe we have both the necessary ``critical mass'' and expertise to work on advanced PKI and security policy issues. URLs: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~keynote/ http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~switchware http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~jms http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~angelos