Dear all,
I'd like to propose a mechanism to automatically prune dead branches
in the RPKI directly subordinate to RIPE NCC. Below is the policy proposal
text that I have in mind.
In short: RIPE NCC should revoke a Delegated CA's certificate when absolutely
no "sign of life" (valid Manifest) has been observed for over a 100 days.
It probably is good to have some discussion around:
* should perpetually broken Delegated CA setups be culled at some point?
* is the continuous lack of a valid current manifest for a 100 day period
of time a good indicator for "Delegated CA brokenness"?
Your feedback is most welcome!
Kind regards,
Job
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Policy Proposal Name:
Automatic Revocation of Persistently Non-functional Delegated RPKI
Certification Authorities
Author:
a. name: Job Snijders
b. email: [email protected]
Proposal Version: (to be assigned by the RIPE NCC)
Submission Date: February 25th, 2025
Suggested RIPE WG for discussion and publication: RIPE Routing Working Group
Proposal Type: NEW
Policy Term: Indefinite
Summary of proposal:
RIPE NCC offers users of its RPKI certification service two
deployment models: "Hosted CA setup" and "Delegated CA setup".
In the Hosted setup RIPE NCC is responsible for timely issuance
and publication of new RPKI Manifests and CRLs, but in the
Delegated setup users themselves manage their CA on their own
infrastructure.
It is possible for Delegated CA infrastructure to be offline for
extended periods of time or for the contents of publication
repositories to become stale or otherwise invalid. This proposal
suggests to provide mandate to RIPE NCC to revoke resource
certificates associated with longtime non-functional CAs to
reduce Relying Party workload.
This policy proposal targets only pathologically non-functional
CAs. An example of a situation considered out-of-scope for this
policy would be a publication repository service advertised to
also be available via IPv6 and RRDP but in practise only
reachable via IPv4 and Rsync: the associated CA would still be
considered functional (provided a valid and current Manifest
could somehow be retrieved and validated sometime in the
previous one hundred days). In other words: this policy proposal
isn't about CAs that didn't achieve 100% uptime, but about CAs
that are down all the time.
Policy text:
If RIPE NCC is unable to discover and validate a Delegated RPKI
Certification Authority's (CA's) current Manifest and CRL for
one hundred consecutive days, that Delegated CA's resource
certificate shall be revoked by the RIPE NCC. RIPE NCC shall
make reasonable efforts to discover new Manifests, for example,
by corroborating information from multiple vantage points. After
revocation, the Resource Holder may either reinitialize the
Delegated CA setup or choose the Hosted CA setup.
Rationale:
a. Arguments supporting the proposal
Persistently Non-functional Delegated CAs (PNDCs, for short)
have subtle effects within the RPKI ecosystem which may become
more pronounced over time.
* PNDCs offer nothing of value to RPs (because without a current
valid Manifest any signed payloads are unavailable).
* RP synchronisation becomes more economic with fewer
purposeless caRepositories to traverse.
* PNDCs besmirch Relying Party (RP) syslog message archives and
waste RP CPU cycles and network traffic.
* Automatic revocation is only a minor inconvenience for CAs
(that already were non-functional to begin with), but a big
deal for RPs - especially when taking into account many
future synchronisation attempts over long periods of time.
b. Arguments opposing the proposal
* Resource holders might require more than one hundred days to
complete the initial Delegated CA setup.
(Counterpoints: initial setup procedures usually only takes a
few minutes. Resource holders are free to simply retry the
delegated CA setup procedure following automatic revocation.)
Additional opposing arguments to be determined.
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