path: root/lib/libkeynote/keynote.4

.\" $OpenBSD: keynote.4,v 1.5 1999/05/27 01:09:44 angelos Exp $
.\"
.\" The author of this code is Angelos D. Keromytis (angelos@dsl.cis.upenn.edu)
.\"
.\" This code was written by Angelos D. Keromytis in Philadelphia, PA, USA,
.\" in April-May 1998
.\"
.\" Copyright (C) 1998, 1999 by Angelos D. Keromytis.
.\"      
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.Dd May 22, 1999
.Dt KeyNote 4
.Os
.\" .TH KeyNote 4 local
.Sh NAME
.Nm KeyNote
.Nd a trust-management system
.Sh SYNOPSIS
.Fd #include <keynote.h>
.Fd Link options: -lkeynote -lm -lcrypto
.Sh DESCRIPTION
Details on the API and the various tools are given in the
man pages listed at the end of this manual.
.Pp
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.

A trust-management system has five basic components:

.nf
* A language for describing `actions,' which are operations with
  security consequences that are to be controlled by the system.

* A mechanism for identifying `principals,' which are entities that
  can be authorized to perform actions.

* A language for specifying application `policies,' which govern the
  actions that principals are authorized to perform.

* A language for specifying `credentials,' which allow principals
  to delegate authorization to other principals.

* A `compliance checker,' which provides a service to applications
  for determining how an action requested by principals should be
  handled, given a policy and a set of credentials.
.fi

The trust-management approach has a number of advantages over other
mechanisms for specifying and controlling authorization, especially
when security policy is distributed over a network or is otherwise
decentralized.

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.

Trust-management policies are easy to distribute across networks,
helping to avoid the need for application-specific distributed policy
configuration mechanisms, access control lists, and certificate
parsers and interpreters.

For a general discussion of the use of trust management in distributed
system security, see the papers listed at the end of this manual.

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.

In KeyNote:

.nf
* Actions are specified as a collection of name-value pairs.

* Principal names can be any convenient string and can directly
  represent cryptographic public keys.

* The same language is used for both policies and credentials.

* The policy and credential language is concise, highly expressive,
  human readable and writable, and compatible with a variety of
  storage and transmission media, including electronic mail.

* The compliance checker returns an application-configured `policy
  compliance value' that describes how a request should be handled
  by the application.  Policy compliance values are always
  positively derived from policy and credentials, facilitating
  analysis of KeyNote-based systems.

* Compliance checking is efficient enough for high-performance and
  real-time applications.
.fi

In KeyNote, the authority to perform trusted actions is associated
with one or more `principals.' A principal may be a physical entity, a
process in an operating system, a public key, or any other convenient
abstraction. KeyNote principals are identified by a string called a
`Principal Identifier.' In some cases, a Principal Identifier will
contain a cryptographic key interpreted by the KeyNote system (e.g.,
for credential signature verification). In other cases, Principal
Identifiers may have a structure that is opaque to KeyNote.

Principals perform two functions of concern to KeyNote: They request
`actions' and they issue `assertions.' Actions are any trusted
operations that an application places under KeyNote control.
Assertions delegate the authorization to perform actions to other
principals.

Actions are described to the KeyNote compliance checker in terms of a
collection of name-value pairs called an `action attribute set.' The
action attribute set is created by the invoking application. Its
structure and format are described in detail in Section 3 of this
document.

KeyNote provides advice to applications on the interpretation of
policy with regard to specific requested actions. Applications invoke
the KeyNote compliance checker by issuing a `query' containing a
proposed action attribute set and identifying the principal(s)
requesting it. The KeyNote system determines and returns an
appropriate `policy compliance value' from an ordered set of possible
responses.

The policy compliance value returned from a KeyNote query advises the
application how to process the requested action. In the simplest case,
the compliance value is Boolean (e.g., "reject" or "approve").
Assertions can also be written to select from a range of possible
compliance values, when appropriate for the application (e.g., "no
access", "restricted access", "full access"). Applications can
configure the relative ordering (from `weakest' to `strongest') of
compliance values at query time.

Assertions are the basic programming unit for specifying policy and
delegating authority. Assertions describe the conditions under which a
principal authorizes actions requested by other principals. An
assertion identifies the principal that made it, which other
principals are being authorized, and the conditions under which the
authorization applies. The syntax of assertions is given in Section 4.

A special principal, whose identifier is "POLICY", provides the root
of trust in KeyNote. "POLICY" is therefore considered to be authorized
to perform any action.

Assertions issued by the "POLICY" principal are called `policy
assertions' and are used to delegate authority to otherwise untrusted
principals. The KeyNote security policy of an application consists of
a collection of policy assertions.

When a principal is identified by a public key, it can digitally sign
assertions and distribute them over untrusted networks for use by
other KeyNote compliance checkers. These signed assertions are also
called `credentials,' and serve a role similar to that of traditional
public key certificates. Policies and credentials share the same
syntax and are evaluated according to the same semantics. A principal
can therefore convert its policy assertions into credentials simply by
digitally signing them.

KeyNote is designed to encourage the creation of human-readable
policies and credentials that are amenable to transmission and storage
over a variety of media. Its assertion syntax is inspired by the
format of RFC822-style message headers. A KeyNote assertion contains a
sequence of sections, called `fields,' each of which specifying one
aspect of the assertion's semantics. Fields start with an identifier
at the beginning of a line and continue until the next field is
encountered. For example:

.nf
  KeyNote-Version: 2
  Comment: A simple, if contrived, email certificate for user mab
  Local-Constants:  ATT_CA_key = "RSA:acdfa1df1011bbac"
                    mab_key = "DSA:deadbeefcafe001a"
  Authorizer: ATT_CA_key
  Licensees: mab_key
  Conditions: ((app_domain == "email")  # valid for email only
            && (address == "mab@research.att.com"));
  Signature: "RSA-SHA1:f00f2244"
.fi

For the exact meanings of all the fields, see the RFC reference at the
end of this manual.

KeyNote semantics resolve the relationship between an application's
policy and actions requested by other principals, as supported by
credentials. The KeyNote compliance checker processes the assertions
against the action attribute set to determine the policy compliance
value of a requested action. These semantics are defined in Section 5.

An important principle in KeyNote's design is `assertion
monotonicity'; the policy compliance value of an action is always
positively derived from assertions made by trusted principals.
Removing an assertion never results in increasing the compliance value
returned by KeyNote for a given query. The monotonicity property can
simplify the design and analysis of complex network-based security
protocols; network failures that prevent the transmission of
credentials can never result in spurious authorization of dangerous
actions.
.Pp
.Sh FILES
.Fd keynote.h
.Fd libkeynote.a
.Sh SEE ALSO
.Xr keynote 1 ,
.Xr keynote 3
.Bl -tag -width "AAAAAAA"
.It ``The KeyNote Trust-Management System'' 
M. Blaze, J. Feigenbaum, A. D. Keromytis,
Internet Drafts, draft-ietf-trustmgt-keynote-00.txt
.It ``Decentralized Trust Management'' 
M. Blaze, J. Feigenbaum, J. Lacy,
1996 IEEE Conference on Privacy and Security
.It ``Compliance-Checking in the PolicyMaker Trust Management System''
M. Blaze, J. Feigenbaum, M. Strauss,
1998 Financial Crypto Conference
.El
.Sh AUTHOR
Angelos D. Keromytis (angelos@dsl.cis.upenn.edu)
.Sh WEB PAGE
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~keynote
.Sh BUGS
None that we know of.
If you find any, please report them at
.Bd -literal -offset indent -compact
keynote@research.att.com
.Ed