Minutes of the September 22-24, 1998 Meeting of the Technical Advisory Committee to Develop a Federal Information Processing Standard for the Federal Key Management Infrastructure The eleventh meeting of the Committee was called to order at 9:15 a.m. by the Chairman, Dr. Stephen Kent, at the Radisson Hotel, San Francisco, CA on September 22, 1998. As with all other TAC meetings, all sessions were open to the public. In addition to the Chairman, members present were: Joe Alexander, Josh Benaloh, Santosh Chokhani, Paul Clark, Jack Edwards, Mark Etzel, Bill Franklin, Richard Hite, Paul Lambert, and Joe Pato. (Note: A quorum (11) was not present at any one time during this meeting. Therefore the assembled members met solely to edit a draft document for consideration by the TAC at a later date. In accordance with the Department’s Committee Management Handbook, no formal actions were taken.) Government liaisons in attendance were Elaine Barker, Julie Lever, Jan Manning, Rich Suter, and Dick Sweeney. The Secretary, Ed Roback, briefly reviewed the Department’s activities to renew the Committee’s charter. Copies of the revised charter were provided to the members. Also, the Secretary’s letter to the Chairman in response to the Committee’s transmittal of its June draft was distributed. The Chairman reviewed his objectives for the meeting, which were to continue review of the document starting where the Committee ceased work in June as well as the glossary, which had not been reviewed. Time permitting, the TAC would also review of the document for consistency. The TAC then began editing the glossary making minor revisions to many terms. Many terms were deleted because they are not used in the text or their definition is apparent from the text. NIST was also asked to review the document for consistency in the use of terms. During the public participation period, Mr. Ken Mendelson of Tristrata Security addressed the TAC. He expressed appreciation to the TAC for their work, which he said was needed, welcomed, and extremely useful. Mr. Mendelson suggested that the TAC write the draft key recovery standard to be broadly inclusive and not PKI-centric. He also provided an overview of Tristrata Security and their encryption system. There followed a discussion regarding the lack of a section that describes the user/scriber function that creates the RRI and sends it to the KRA. Some members argued that we need a requirement that the RRI be sent securely to the KRA. This issue will have to be resolved at the November meeting. Dr. Benaloh accepted an action to send e-mail to the TAC regarding his proposal to eliminate the three requirements of section 3.2.1.4 for the KRI Generation Function to produce validatable KRI, for level 1. His concern is that in a system with no validation, the mandate of validatability may be onerous. In particular, if we consider the case of a level 1 KRS which is being used, the cost of providing validatable KRI may be large for an unwanted function. He did not propose changes for the level 2 KRI Generator Function. Dr. Chokhani did not agree with this proposal and also agreed to frame his proposal on this matter, which was to make the KRI Generation and KRI Validation configurable at least for Level 1 (as opposed to eliminating the requirement) to provide requisite security. It will also allow a specific installation to achieve interoperability with products implementing different schemes or with products implementing the same scheme with key recovery disabled. This matter would be discussed via e-mail with the membership and needs to be decided at the November meeting. In discussions, a proposal was made to amend Section 3 to define a new security level (Level 0) for the Key Recovery Requestor Function for self-recovery. Members noted the need to review the document based upon this change to determine whether it introduces any security complications. Discussion over the assurance section indicated a strong desire to streamline the section to increase understandability. Dr. Chokhani will revise Section 4 to eliminate the use of confusing common criteria notation and reflect necessary changes resulting from the introduction of a “Level 0.” Additionally, in the spirit of streamining, Dr. Chokhani agreed to take all developer action items and view them as contextual/explanatory; the “context and presentation headings will be eliminated, but the requirements themselves will remain. The evaluation action items will be removed as requirements, but kept as explanatory, when necessary. Thus, the revised Section 4 would appear to be more parallel in construction and presentation to Section 3. Section 5, which is incomplete and unnecessary was removed. However, it was noted that members desiring to see the section included could complete the section for consideration in November, at their discretion. If this were done, it should be distributed before the meeting for review by TAC members. Interoperability and other cross-references to Section #5 also will be deleted. The meeting then turned to the issue of recoverability of KRR-KRA communications. In order to avoid recursive recoverability, members will have a choice (at the November meeting): 1) make KRR-KRA communications recoverable, or 2) specify the need for strict constraints on this communications channel so as to constrain the ability to use it for other communications. This ties into other TAC discussions as to whether a strict (but unspecified) formatting was necessary for such communications to accomplish this. Next, the appendices were reviewed. Appendix A (old Appendix E) will remain to provide an overview of the key encapsulation and key escrow key recovery techniques. It will also include the text describing issues regarding interactions between systems using different recovery techniques. The language about specific protocols will be deleted. The new Appendix B (old Appendix A) will now be devoted to examples, covering the KR function distribution, multiple KRI generation functions, and KRI generation scenarios. The Appendix C (drawing from old Appendix B) will become a general discussion of the benefits of a standardized KR block without specific discussion of its exact construction or contents. The old Appendix D was deleted as the examples, because they were all e-mail based. The new Appendix D (old Appendix C) will be devoted to issues of certificate extensions. Dr. Kent agreed to re-work a draft of this material, particularly a lead-in description for the CSOR section. Dr. Chokhani would provide descriptive text for the CSOR section. The language in the old Appendix E will be moved to be included in the new Appendix A. The meeting was adjourned at 5:30 p.m., Thursday, September 24, 1998. References 1. TAC document dated 7/7/98 (starting document for 9/98 meeting) 2. Red-lined draft document (at end of 9/98 meeting) (Note that this draft was to be further edited by NIST as a result of discussions at the 9/98 meeting in preparation for 11/98 meeting. ) 3. Agenda 4. Federal Register Meeting announcement 5. New Charter 6. Letter to Dr. Kent from Secretary of Commerce Daley Note: A quorum (11) was not present at any one time during this meeting. Therefore the assembled members met solely to edit a draft document for consideration by the TAC at a later date. In accordance with the Department’s Committee Management Handbook, no formal actions were taken.