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Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) S. Turner Request for Comments: 5967 IECA Updates: 2986 August 2010 Category: Informational ISSN: 2070-1721

                 The application/pkcs10 Media Type

Abstract

 This document specifies a media type used to carry PKCS #10
 certification requests as defined in RFC 2986.  It carries over the
 original specification from RFC 2311, which recently has been moved
 to Historic status, and properly links it to RFC 2986.

Status of This Memo

 This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is
 published for informational purposes.

 This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force
 (IETF).  It represents the consensus of the IETF community.  It has
 received public review and has been approved for publication by the
 Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG).  Not all documents
 approved by the IESG are a candidate for any level of Internet
 Standard; see Section 2 of RFC 5741.

 Information about the current status of this document, any errata,
 and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at
 http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5967.

Copyright Notice

 Copyright (c) 2010 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
 document authors.  All rights reserved.

 This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
 Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
 (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
 publication of this document.  Please review these documents
 carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
 to this document.  Code Components extracted from this document must
 include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
 the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
 described in the Simplified BSD License.

Turner Informational [Page 1] RFC 5967 application/pkcs10 Media Type August 2010

 This document may contain material from IETF Documents or IETF
 Contributions published or made publicly available before November
 10, 2008.  The person(s) controlling the copyright in some of this
 material may not have granted the IETF Trust the right to allow
 modifications of such material outside the IETF Standards Process.
 Without obtaining an adequate license from the person(s) controlling
 the copyright in such materials, this document may not be modified
 outside the IETF Standards Process, and derivative works of it may
 not be created outside the IETF Standards Process, except to format
 it for publication as an RFC or to translate it into languages other
 than English.

1. Introduction

 [RFC2311] first defined the application/pkcs10 media type.  When
 [RFC2633] was published, the application/pkcs10 section was dropped,
 but for some reason the text was not incorporated into the PKCS #10
 document [RFC2986].  [RFC2311] was moved to Historic status by
 [RFC5751].  To ensure the IANA media type registration points to a
 non-Historic document, this document updates [RFC2986] with the
 definition of the application/pkcs10 media type and an IANA
 registration based on [RFC4288].

 The text for Section 2 is adapted from Section 3.7 of [RFC2311].

1.1. Requirements Terminology

 The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
 "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
 document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].

2. Creating a Certification Request

 A typical application that allows a user to generate cryptographic
 information has to submit that information to a Certification
 Authority (CA), who transforms it into a certificate.  PKCS #10
 [RFC2986] describes a syntax for certification requests.

 The details of certification requests and the process of obtaining a
 certificate are beyond the scope of this memo.  Instead, only the
 format of data used in application/pkcs10 is defined.

2.1. Format of the application/pkcs10 Body

 PKCS #10 defines the ASN.1 type CertificationRequest for use in
 submitting a certification request.  For transfer to a CA, this
 abstract syntax needs to be encoded and identified in a unique

Turner Informational [Page 2] RFC 5967 application/pkcs10 Media Type August 2010

 manner.  When the media type application/pkcs10 is used, the body
 MUST be a CertificationRequest.

 A robust application SHOULD output Distinguished Encoding Rules
 (DER), but allow Basic Encoding Rules (BER) or DER on input.

 Data produced by BER or DER is 8-bit, but some transports are limited
 to 7-bit data.  In such cases, a suitable 7-bit transfer encoding
 MUST be applied; in MIME-compatible transports, the base64 encoding
 [RFC4648] SHOULD be used with application/pkcs10, although any 7-bit
 transfer encoding may work.

2.2. Sending and Receiving an application/pkcs10 Body Part

 For sending a certificate-signing request, the application/pkcs10
 message format MUST be used to convey a PKCS #10 certificate-signing
 request.  Note that for sending certificates and Certificate
 Revocation Lists (CRLs) without any signed content, the
 application/pkcs7-mime message format MUST be used to convey a
 degenerate PKCS #7 signedData "certs-only" message [RFC5751].

 To send an application/pkcs10 body, the application generates the
 cryptographic information for the user.  The details of the
 cryptographic information are beyond the scope of this memo.

 Step 1. The cryptographic information is placed within a PKCS #10
         CertificationRequest.

 Step 2. The CertificationRequest is encoded according to BER or DER
         (preferred, DER).

 Step 3. As a typical step, the encoded CertificationRequest is also
         base64 encoded so that it is 7-bit data suitable for transfer
         in ESMTP.  This then becomes the body of an
         application/pkcs10 body part.

 The result might look like this:

    Content-Type: application/pkcs10; name=smime.p10
    Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
    Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=smime.p10

    rfvbnj756tbBghyHhHUujhJhjH77n8HHGT9HG4VQpfyF467GhIGfHfYT6
    7n8HHGghyHhHUujhJh4VQpfyF467GhIGfHfYGTrfvbnjT6jH7756tbB9H
    f8HHGTrfvhJhjH776tbB9HG4VQbnj7567GhIGfHfYT6ghyHhHUujpfyF4
    0GhIGfHfQbnj756YT64V

Turner Informational [Page 3] RFC 5967 application/pkcs10 Media Type August 2010

 A typical application only needs to send a certification request.  It
 is a Certification Authority that has to receive and process the
 request.  The steps for recovering the CertificationRequest from the
 message are straightforward but are not presented here.  The
 procedures for processing the certification request are beyond the
 scope of this document.

3. IANA Considerations

 IANA has updated the registration for the application/pkcs10 media
 subtype in the Application Media Types registry using the filled-in
 template from BCP 13 [RFC4288] given below.

3.1. Registration of Media Subtype application/pkcs10

 The media subtype for a PKCS #10 certification request is
 application/pkcs10.

    Type name: application

    Subtype name: pkcs10

    Required parameters: None

    Optional parameters: None

    Encoding considerations: binary; see Section 2.

    Security considerations:

       Clients use a certification request to request that a
       Certification Authority certify a public key.  The
       certification request is digitally signed.  Also, see
       Section 6.

    Interoperability considerations: See Section 2.

    Published specification: This specification.

    Applications which use this media type:

       Applications that support PKCS #10 certification requests
       [RFC2986].

    Additional information:

       Magic number(s): None
       File extension(s): .p10

Turner Informational [Page 4] RFC 5967 application/pkcs10 Media Type August 2010

       Macintosh File Type Code(s):

    Person & email address to contact for further information:
      Sean Turner <turners@ieca.com>

    Restrictions on usage: none

    Author: Sean Turner <turners@ieca.com>

    Intended usage: COMMON

    Change controller: The IESG

4. Security Considerations

 The security considerations of [RFC2986] and [RFC5751] apply; no new
 security considerations are introduced by this document.

5. Acknowledgements

 I wish to thank the authors of RFC 2311, Steve Dusse, Paul Hoffman,
 Blake Ramsdell, Laurence Lundblade, and Lisa Repka.

 I would also like to thank Bjoern Hoehrmann for his review of the
 media subtype application.

6. References

6.1. Normative References

 [RFC2119]  Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
            Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.

 [RFC2986]  Nystrom, M. and B. Kaliski, "PKCS #10: Certification
            Request Syntax Specification Version 1.7", RFC 2986,
            November 2000.

 [RFC4288]  Freed, N. and J. Klensin, "Media Type Specifications and
            Registration Procedures", BCP 13, RFC 4288, December 2005.

 [RFC4648]  Josefsson, S., "The Base16, Base32, and Base64 Data
            Encodings", RFC 4648, October 2006.

 [RFC5751]  Ramsdell, B. and S. Turner, "Secure/Multipurpose Internet
            Mail Extensions (S/MIME) Version 3.2 Message
            Specification", RFC 5751, January 2010.

Turner Informational [Page 5] RFC 5967 application/pkcs10 Media Type August 2010

 [X.690]    ITU-T Recommendation X.690 (2002) | ISO/IEC 8825-1:2002.
            Information Technology - ASN.1 encoding rules:
            Specification of Basic Encoding Rules (BER), Canonical
            Encoding Rules (CER) and Distinguished Encoding Rules
            (DER).

6.2. Informative References

 [RFC2311]  Dusse, S., Hoffman, P., Ramsdell, B., Lundblade, L., and
            L. Repka, "S/MIME Version 2 Message Specification", RFC
            2311, March 1998.

 [RFC2633]  Ramsdell, B., Ed., "S/MIME Version 3 Message
            Specification", RFC 2633, June 1999.

Author's Address

 Sean Turner
 IECA, Inc.
 3057 Nutley Street, Suite 106
 Fairfax, VA 22031
 USA

 EMail: turners@ieca.com

Turner Informational [Page 6]