umbilical: add README (#69)

umbilical: add README

Co-authored-by: Luke Valenta <lvalenta@cloudflare.com>

Author: bwesterb

umbilical/README.md

@@ -0,0 +1,77 @@
+Umbilical certificates
+======================
+
+For first experiments with Merkle Tree Certificates, a client may wish
+that each Merkle Tree Certificate is backed by a traditional X.509
+certificate (chain) issued by a trusted CA. We call this the *umbilical*
+certificate/chain.
+
+To accommodate this we allocate two new `EvidenceType`:
+
+```
+enum {
+    umbilical(0),
+    compressed_umbilical(1),
+    (2^16-1)
+} EvidenceType;
+```
+
+For `umbilical` the `info` field of an `Evidence` entry contains the
+concatenated ASN.1 DER encoded X.509 certificates of the umbilical chain.
+
+The `-from-x509-pem` (`-x`) and `-from-x509-server` (`-X`) options to
+`mtc ca queue` and `mtc new-assertion-request` will automatically
+add the X.509 chain as evidence to the assertion-request.
+
+MTCA evidence policy
+--------------------
+By default, the MTCA will publish the evidence, but it will not check it
+or require its presence.
+
+The MTCA can be configured to require umbilical evidence before publishing,
+by setting the *evidence policy* to `umbilical`:
+
+```
+mtc ca new -evidence-policy umbilical -umbilical-roots root_store.certs  62253.12.15 ca.example.com
+```
+
+The `-umbilical-roots` flag sets the PEM encoded root certificates that
+are accepted. 
+
+Before accepting an assertion request to the queue, the MTCA will
+require an umbilical chain as evidence, which verifies against one
+of the umbilical roots. It will also check revocation using OCSP if available,
+and falling back to CRL otherwise. CRLs are cached in `revocation-cache`.
+
+A mirror will follow the evidence policy set by the CA. If the CA does not
+have an evidence policy set, the mirror will simply copy evidence, but not
+performe any checks. If the CA has umbilical evidence policy, it will
+check for each entry whether the umbilical evidence is present and correct.
+
+To ensure the mirror checks umbilical evidence, you can
+pass `-evidence-policy umbilical` to `mtc mirror new`. You can also set
+the umbilical roots using `-umbilical-roots`, which are otherwise blindly
+copied from the CA.
+
+Compressed umbilical
+--------------------
+The plain `umbilical` evidence format will lead to many duplicated
+intermediate certificates. To save space, there is an alternate format
+`compressed_umbilical`. Evidence with the `compressed_umbilical` type
+has as `info` field set to the concatenation of the SHA256 hashes
+of each of the original ASN.1 DER encoded X.509 certificates.
+
+The certificates themselves are published in an `umbilical-certificates`
+file in each batch. The format of the `umbilical-certificates` file
+is described in `umbilical/frozencas/frozencas.go`. It basically
+concatenates the certificates and adds a simple index to look up
+a certificate by its SHA256 hash using interpolation search.
+(`frozencas` stands for *frozen content-addressed storage* btw.)
+
+An umbilical certificate does not have to appear in the `umbilical-certificates`
+file of the batch it's used in, but must appear in one of the batches within
+the window that ends at the current batch.
+
+The mirror accepts both umbilical and compressed umbilical evidence.
+When set to umbilical evidence policy, the MTCA will always use the
+compressed evidence format.