Hi dear TLS experts, 

 

Apologies for my stupid question for advise: 

I am currently working on some design requirements for mutual authentication
and have a question regarding verification of client certificate. 

 

In many web scenarios the simple use is server authentication by certificate
and verification of client id by username & password or by a simple
verification of client certificate. 

 

Are there any RFCs that speak (beyond the general verification of the
certificate in mutual TLS authentication) to the need to also verify the CN
inside the client certificate against an additional whitelist _before_
establishing a TLS connection. 

 

For example in this scenario: 

A client with a valid certificate may be allowed to connect to application
1, but would not be allowed to connect to application 2. (for sake of
separation application 1 and 2 are on separate servers (application 1 on
server 1 and application 2 on server 2).) 

 

>From my current understanding, I would establish the TLS connection in both
cases, do mutual authentication and then let application 2 reject access
based on that the user is not allowed to access it. There is a question
whether this would expose to a risk that server resources could be exhausted
by allowing to establish the TLS connection before failing, but this does
not seem too bad to me. But maybe I am missing something.

 

Are there any informational (or standard) RFCs for TLS that speak about this
risk and best practices to address it?  

(e.g. using additional whitelist checks of parameters inside the client
certificate for access control checks already during phase of establishing
the TLS connection)

 

Thank you and sorry for bothering, Tobias

 

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