]> Isode Ltd

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DigiCert

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Security EAI PKIX email address This document defines a new name form for inclusion in the otherName field of an X.509 Subject Alternative Name and Issuer Alternative Name extension that allows a certificate subject to be associated with an internationalized email address. This document updates RFC 5280 and obsoletes RFC 8398. About This Document The latest revision of this draft can be found at . Status information for this document may be found at . Discussion of this document takes place on the Limited Additional Mechanisms for PKIX and SMIME (lamps) Working Group mailing list (), which is archived at . Subscribe at . Source for this draft and an issue tracker can be found at .

Introduction defines the rfc822Name subjectAltName name type for representing email addresses as described in . The syntax of rfc822Name is restricted to a subset of US-ASCII characters and thus can't be used to represent internationalized email addresses . This document defines a new otherName variant to represent internationalized email addresses. In addition this document requires all email address domains in X.509 certificates to conform to IDNA2008 .

Conventions and Definitions The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here.

Name Definitions The GeneralName structure is defined in and supports many different name forms including otherName for extensibility. This section specifies the SmtpUTF8Mailbox name form of otherName so that internationalized email addresses can appear in the subjectAltName of a certificate, the issuerAltName of a certificate, or anywhere else that GeneralName is used. When the subjectAltName (or issuerAltName) extension contains an internationalized email address with a non-ASCII Local-part, the address MUST be stored in the SmtpUTF8Mailbox name form of otherName. The format of SmtpUTF8Mailbox is defined as the ABNF rule SmtpUTF8Mailbox. SmtpUTF8Mailbox is a modified version of the internationalized Mailbox that was defined in Section 3.3 of , which was derived from Mailbox as defined in Section 4.1.2 of . defines the following ABNF rules for Mailbox whose parts are modified for internationalization: Local-part, Dot-string, Quoted-string, QcontentSMTP, Domain, and Atom. In particular, Local-part was updated to also support UTF8-non-ascii. UTF8-non-ascii was described by Section 3.1 of . Also, domain was extended to support U-labels, as defined in . This document further refines internationalized Mailbox ABNF rules as described in and calls this SmtpUTF8Mailbox. In SmtpUTF8Mailbox, labels that include non-ASCII characters MUST be stored in A-label (rather than U-label) form . This restriction reduces complexity for implementations of the certification path validation algorithm defined in Section 6 of . In SmtpUTF8Mailbox, domain labels that solely use ASCII characters (meaning neither A- nor U-labels) SHALL use NR-LDH restrictions as specified by Section 2.3.1 of . NR-LDH stands for "Non-Reserved Letters Digits Hyphen" and is the set of LDH labels that do not have "--" characters in the third and forth character position, which excludes "tagged domain names" such as A-labels. To facilitate octet-for-octet comparisons of SmtpUTF8Mailbox values, all NR-LDH and A-label labels which constitute the domain part SHALL only be encoded with lowercase letters. Consistent with the treatment of rfc822Name in , SmtpUTF8Mailbox is an envelope Mailbox and has no phrase (such as a common name) before it, has no comment (text surrounded in parentheses) after it, and is not surrounded by "<" and ">" characters. Due to name constraint compatibility reasons described in , SmtpUTF8Mailbox subjectAltName MUST NOT be used unless the Local-part of the email address contains non-ASCII characters. When the Local- part is ASCII, rfc822Name subjectAltName MUST be used instead of SmtpUTF8Mailbox. This is compatible with legacy software that supports only rfc822Name (and not SmtpUTF8Mailbox). The appropriate usage of rfc822Name and SmtpUTF8Mailbox is summarized in Table 1 below. SmtpUTF8Mailbox is encoded as UTF8String. The UTF8String encoding MUST NOT contain a Byte-Order-Mark (BOM) to aid consistency across implementations, particularly for comparison. Email Address Formatting

Local-part char	subjectAltName
ASCII-only	rfc822Name
non-ASCII	SmtpUTF8Mailbox

Non-ASCII Local-part values may additionally include ASCII characters.

IDNA2008 To facilitate comparison between email addresses, all email address domains in X.509 certificates MUST conform to IDNA2008 (and avoid any "mappings" mentioned in that document). Use of non-conforming email address domains introduces the possibility of conversion errors between alternate forms. This applies to SmtpUTF8Mailbox and rfc822Name in subjectAltName, issuerAltName, and anywhere else that these are used.

Matching of Internationalized Email Addresses in X.509 Certificates Equivalence comparisons with SmtpUTF8Mailbox consist of a domain part step and a Local-part step. The comparison form for Local-parts is always UTF-8. The comparison form for domain parts is always performed with the LDH-label () encoding of the relevant domain labels. The comparison of LDH-labels in domain parts reduces complexity for implementations of the certification path validation algorithm as defined Section 6 of by obviating the need to convert domain labels to their Unicode representation. Comparison of two SmtpUTF8Mailboxes is straightforward with no setup work needed. They are considered equivalent if there is an exact octet-for-octet match. Comparison of a SmtpUTF8Mailbox and rfc822Name will always fail. SmtpUTF8Mailbox values SHALL contain a Local-part which includes one or more non-ASCII characters, while rfc822Names only include ASCII characters (including the Local-part). Thus, a SmtpUTF8Mailbox and rfc822Name will never match. Comparison of SmtpUTF8Mailbox values with internationalized email addresses from other sources (such as received email messages, user input, etc.) requires additional setup steps for domain part and Local-part. The initial preparation for the email address to compare with the SmtpUTF8Mailbox value is to remove any phrases, comments, and "<" or ">" characters. For the setup of the domain part, the following conversions SHALL be performed:

1. Convert all labels which constitute the domain part that include non-ASCII characters to A-labels if not already in that form. a. Detect all U-labels present within the domain part using Section 5.1 of . b. Transform all detected U-labels (Unicode) to A-labels (ASCII) as specified in Section 5.5 of .
2. Convert all uppercase letters found within the NR-LDH and A-label labels which constitute the domain part to lowercase letters.

For the setup of the Local-part, the Local-part MUST be verified to conform to the requirements of and , including being a string in UTF-8 form. In particular, the Local- part MUST NOT be transformed in any way, such as by doing case folding or normalization of any kind. The Local-part part of an internationalized email address is already in UTF-8. Once setup is complete, they are again compared octet-for-octet. To summarize non-normatively, the comparison steps, including setup, are:

1. If the domain contains U-labels, transform them to A-labels.
2. If any NR-LDH or A-label domain label in the domain part contains uppercase letters, lowercase them.
3. Compare strings octet-for-octet for equivalence.

This specification expressly does not define any wildcard characters, and SmtpUTF8Mailbox comparison implementations MUST NOT interpret any characters as wildcards. Instead, to specify multiple email addresses through SmtpUTF8Mailbox, the certificate MUST use multiple subjectAltNames or issuerAltNames to explicitly carry any additional email addresses.

Name Constraints in Path Validation This section updates Section 4.2.1.10 of to extend rfc822Name name constraints to SmtpUTF8Mailbox subjectAltNames. SmtpUTF8Mailbox-aware path validators will apply name constraint comparison to the subject distinguished name and both forms of subject alternative names rfc822Name and SmtpUTF8Mailbox. Both rfc822Name and SmtpUTF8Mailbox subject alternative names represent the same underlying email address namespace. Since legacy CAs constrained to issue certificates for a specific set of domains would lack corresponding UTF-8 constraints, updates, modifies, and extends rfc822Name name constraints defined in to cover SmtpUTF8Mailbox subject alternative names. This ensures that the introduction of SmtpUTF8Mailbox does not violate existing name constraints. Since it is not valid to include non-ASCII UTF-8 characters in the Local-part of rfc822Name name constraints, and since name constraints that include a Local-part are rarely, if at all, used in practice, name constraints updated in allow the forms that represent all addresses at a host or all mailboxes in a domain and deprecates rfc822Name name constraints that represent a particular mailbox. That is, rfc822Name constraints with a Local-part SHOULD NOT be used. Constraint comparison with SmtpUTF8Mailbox subjectAltName starts with the setup steps defined by . Setup converts the inputs of the comparison (which is one of a subject distinguished name, an rfc822Name, or an SmtpUTF8Mailbox subjectAltName, and one of an rfc822Name name constraint) to constraint comparison form. For both the name constraint and the subject, this will convert all A-labels and NR-LDH labels to lowercase. Strip the Local-part and "@" separator from each rfc822Name and SmtpUTF8Mailbox, leaving just the domain part. After setup, this follows the comparison steps defined in Section 4.2.1.10 of as follows. If the resulting name constraint domain starts with a "." character, then for the name constraint to match, a suffix of the resulting subject alternative name domain MUST match the name constraint (including the leading ".") octet-for-octet. If the resulting name constraint domain does not start with a "." character, then for the name constraint to match, the entire resulting subject alternative name domain MUST match the name constraint octet-for-octet. Certificate Authorities that wish to issue CA certificates with email address name constraints MUST use rfc822Name subject alternative names only. These MUST be IDNA2008-conformant names with no mappings and with non-ASCII domains encoded in A-labels only. The name constraint requirement with SmtpUTF8Mailbox subject alternative name is illustrated in the non-normative diagram in . The first example (1) illustrates a permitted rfc822Name ASCII-only host name name constraint and the corresponding valid rfc822Name subjectAltName and SmtpUTF8Mailbox subjectAltName email addresses. The second example (2) illustrates a permitted rfc822Name host name name constraint with A-label, and the corresponding valid rfc822Name subjectAltName and SmtpUTF8Mailbox subjectAltName email addresses. Note that an email address with ASCII-only Local-part is encoded as rfc822Name despite also having Unicode present in the domain.

Name Constraints with SmtpUTF8Name and rfc822Name

Security Considerations Use of SmtpUTF8Mailbox for certificate subjectAltName (and issuerAltName) will incur many of the same security considerations as in Section 8 in , but it introduces a new issue by permitting non-ASCII characters in the email address Local-part. This issue, as mentioned in Section 4.4 of and in Section 4 of , is that use of Unicode introduces the risk of visually similar and identical characters that can be exploited to deceive the recipient. The former document references some means to mitigate against these attacks. See for more background on security issues with Unicode.

Differences from RFC 8398 This document obsoletes . There are three major changes defined in this specification which deviate from :

1. In all cases, domain labels in mail addresses SHALL be encoded as LDH-labels. In particular, domain names SHALL NOT be encoded using U-Labels and instead use A-Labels.
2. To accommodate the first change listed above, the mail address matching algorithm defined in Section 5 of has been modified to only accept domain labels that are encoded using their A-label representation.
3. Additionally, the name constraints processing algorithm defined in Section 6 of has been modified to only accept domain labels that are encoded using their A-label representation.

IANA Considerations Update the document reference for the SmtpUTF8Mailbox otherName in the "SMI Security for PKIX Other Name Forms" (1.3.6.1.5.5.7.8) registry from RFC 8398 to this document.

References Normative References Vigil Security, LLC n.d. This memo profiles the X.509 v3 certificate and X.509 v2 certificate revocation list (CRL) for use in the Internet. An overview of this approach and model is provided as an introduction. The X.509 v3 certificate format is described in detail, with additional information regarding the format and semantics of Internet name forms. Standard certificate extensions are described and two Internet-specific extensions are defined. A set of required certificate extensions is specified. The X.509 v2 CRL format is described in detail along with standard and Internet-specific extensions. An algorithm for X.509 certification path validation is described. An ASN.1 module and examples are provided in the appendices. [STANDARDS-TRACK] This document is a specification of the basic protocol for Internet electronic mail transport. It consolidates, updates, and clarifies several previous documents, making all or parts of most of them obsolete. It covers the SMTP extension mechanisms and best practices for the contemporary Internet, but does not provide details about particular extensions. Although SMTP was designed as a mail transport and delivery protocol, this specification also contains information that is important to its use as a "mail submission" protocol for "split-UA" (User Agent) mail reading systems and mobile environments. [STANDARDS-TRACK] This document specifies an SMTP extension for transport and delivery of email messages with internationalized email addresses or header information. [STANDARDS-TRACK] This document is one of a collection that, together, describe the protocol and usage context for a revision of Internationalized Domain Names for Applications (IDNA), superseding the earlier version. It describes the document collection and provides definitions and other material that are common to the set. [STANDARDS-TRACK] In many standards track documents several words are used to signify the requirements in the specification. These words are often capitalized. This document defines these words as they should be interpreted in IETF documents. This document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the Internet Community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements. RFC 2119 specifies common key words that may be used in protocol specifications. This document aims to reduce the ambiguity by clarifying that only UPPERCASE usage of the key words have the defined special meanings. Internet mail was originally limited to 7-bit ASCII. MIME added support for the use of 8-bit character sets in body parts, and also defined an encoded-word construct so other character sets could be used in certain header field values. However, full internationalization of electronic mail requires additional enhancements to allow the use of Unicode, including characters outside the ASCII repertoire, in mail addresses as well as direct use of Unicode in header fields like "From:", "To:", and "Subject:", without requiring the use of complex encoded-word constructs. This document specifies an enhancement to the Internet Message Format and to MIME that allows use of Unicode in mail addresses and most header field content. This specification updates Section 6.4 of RFC 2045 to eliminate the restriction prohibiting the use of non-identity content-transfer- encodings on subtypes of "message/". [STANDARDS-TRACK] ISO/IEC 10646-1 defines a large character set called the Universal Character Set (UCS) which encompasses most of the world's writing systems. The originally proposed encodings of the UCS, however, were not compatible with many current applications and protocols, and this has led to the development of UTF-8, the object of this memo. UTF-8 has the characteristic of preserving the full US-ASCII range, providing compatibility with file systems, parsers and other software that rely on US-ASCII values but are transparent to other values. This memo obsoletes and replaces RFC 2279. This document is the revised protocol definition for Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs). The rationale for changes, the relationship to the older specification, and important terminology are provided in other documents. This document specifies the protocol mechanism, called Internationalized Domain Names in Applications (IDNA), for registering and looking up IDNs in a way that does not require changes to the DNS itself. IDNA is only meant for processing domain names, not free text. [STANDARDS-TRACK] Full use of electronic mail throughout the world requires that (subject to other constraints) people be able to use close variations on their own names (written correctly in their own languages and scripts) as mailbox names in email addresses. This document introduces a series of specifications that define mechanisms and protocol extensions needed to fully support internationalized email addresses. These changes include an SMTP extension and extension of email header syntax to accommodate UTF-8 data. The document set also includes discussion of key assumptions and issues in deploying fully internationalized email. This document is a replacement for RFC 4952; it reflects additional issues identified since that document was published. [STANDARDS-TRACK] This document defines a new name form for inclusion in the otherName field of an X.509 Subject Alternative Name and Issuer Alternative Name extension that allows a certificate subject to be associated with an internationalized email address. This document updates RFC 5280. Informative References The Public Key Infrastructure using X.509 (PKIX) certificate format, and many associated formats, are expressed using ASN.1. The current ASN.1 modules conform to the 1988 version of ASN.1. This document updates those ASN.1 modules to conform to the 2002 version of ASN.1. There are no bits-on-the-wire changes to any of the formats; this is simply a change to the syntax. This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is published for informational purposes.

ASN.1 Module The following ASN.1 module normatively specifies the SmtpUTF8Mailbox structure. This specification uses the ASN.1 definitions from with the 2002 ASN.1 notation used in that document. updates normative documents using older ASN.1 notation.

Example of SmtpUTF8Mailbox This non-normative example demonstrates using SmtpUTF8Mailbox as an otherName in GeneralName to encode the email address "u+533Bu+751F@xn--pss25c.example.com". The hexadecimal DER encoding of the block is: The text decoding is: The example was encoded using Google's "der-ascii" program and the above text decoding is an output of Peter Gutmann's "dumpasn1" program.

Acknowledgments TODO Previous document: Thank you to Magnus Nystrom for motivating this document. Thanks to Russ Housley, Nicolas Lidzborski, Laetitia Baudoin, Ryan Sleevi, Sean Leonard, Sean Turner, John Levine, and Patrik Falstrom for their feedback. Also special thanks to John Klensin for his valuable input on internationalization, Unicode, and ABNF formatting; to Jim Schaad for his help with the ASN.1 example and his helpful feedback; and especially to Viktor Dukhovni for helping us with name constraints and his many detailed document reviews. This document: David Benjamin