OSCORE in aiocoap

Introducing OSCORE

OSCORE (RFC8613) is an end-to-end security mechanism available for CoAP and implemented in aiocoap.

Its main advantage over lower-layer protection (IPsec, (D)TLS) is that it can leverage any CoAP transport (as well as HTTP), can traverse proxies preserving some of their features (like block-wise fragmentation and retransmission) and supports multicast and other group communication scenarios (implemented, but not covered here as it needs even more manual actions so far).

By itself, OSCORE has no key exchange protocol; it relies on other protocols to establidsh keys (there is ongoing work on a lightweight key exchange named EDHOC, and the ACE-OSCORE profile goes some way). Until those are implemented and wide-spread, OSCORE contexts can be provisioned manually to devices.

OSCORE state

Unless an add-on mode (sometimes called B2 mode as it’s describe in OSCORE’s Appendix B.2) is used, some run-time information needs to be stored along with an OSCORE key.

This allows instantaneous zero-round-trip trusted requests with just a single round-trip (ie. a client can shut down, wake up with a different network address, and still the first UDP package it sends to the server can be relied and acted upon immediately). In this mode, there is no need for the device to have a reliable source of entropy.

In practice, this means that OSCORE keys need to reside in writable directories, are occasionally written to (the mechanisms of Appendix B.1 ensure that writes are rare: they happen at startup, shutdown, and only occasionally at runtime).

Warning

This also means that stored OSCORE contexts must never be copied, only moved (or have the original deleted right after a copy).

Where copies are unavoidable (eg. as part of a system backup), they must not be used unless it can be proven that the original was not written to at all after the backup was taken.

When that can not be proven, the context must be deemed lost and reestablished by different means.

OSCORE credentials

As an experimental format, OSCORE uses JSON based credentials files that describes OSCORE or (D)TLS credentials.

For client, they indicate which URIs should be accessed using which OSCORE context. For servers, they indicate the available OSCORE contexts clients could use, and provide labels for them.

The keys and IDs themselves are stored in a directory referenced by the credentials file; this allows the state writes to be performed independently.

OSCORE example

This example sets up encrypted access to the file server demo from the generic command line client.

Note

Manual provisioning of OSCORE contexts is not expected to be a long-term solution, and meant primarily for initial experimentation.

Do not expect the security contexts set up here to be usable indefinitely, as the credentials and security context format used by aiocoap is still in flux. Moreover, the expample will change over time to reflect the best use of OSCORE possible with the current implementation.

First, create a pair of security contexts:

client1/for-fileserver/settings.json:

{
  "sender-id_hex": "01",
  "recipient-id_ascii": "file",

  "secret_ascii": "Correct Horse Battery Staple"
}

server/from-client1/settings.json:

{
  "recipient-id_hex": "01",
  "sender-id_ascii": "file",

  "secret_ascii": "Correct Horse Battery Staple"
}

A single secret must only be used once – please use something more unique than the standard passphrase.

With each of those goes a credentials map:

client1.json:

{
  "coap://localhost/*": { "oscore": { "contextfile": "client1/for-fileserver/" } }
}

server.json:

{
  ":client1": { "oscore": { "contextfile": "server/from-client1/" } }
}

Then, the server can be started:

$ ./aiocoap-fileserver data-to-be-served/ --credentials server.json

And queried using the client:

$ ./aiocoap-client coap://localhost/ --credentials client1.json
<subdirectory/>; ct="40",
<other-directory/>; ct="40",
<README>

Note that just passing in those credentials does not on its own make the server require encrypted communication, let alone require authorization. Requests without credentials still work, and in this very example it’d need a network sniffer (or increased verbosity) to even be sure that the request was protected.

Ways of implementing access controls, mandatory encryption and access control are being explored - as are extensions that simplify the setup process.