transparency-dev / transparency-dev/tesseract

[Demand Signal] Rate limit submissions on issuer

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enhancement
Dominant language
Go
Stars
37
Forks
18
Avg merge
19h 22m
Merged PRs (30d)
15

Description

Trillian + CTFE was able to rate limit submission based on the first issuing certificate in a chain.

This is something that we could do with TesseraCT, but it is unclear whether it is required at the moment:

  1. That I am aware of, this never kicked in with Trillian + CTFE.
  2. If such a rate limit kicked in, this would mean that a CA is mass issuing a certificates (due to a bug, or for a legitimate reason). This could be related to a serious incident, that might require hands on help from CT log operators. We'd probably page log operators if this is really serious anyways. A rate limit would ensure fair resource usage while an oncaller investigates.
  3. A CA could still issue a different intermediate for every cert they issue (there's precedent with Google's compliance monitor, and also remember that we're talking of potential bugs) , in which case, rate limiting based on the first issuer in the chain wouldn't be useful.

I gave this a try with TesseraCT over there: https://github.com/phbnf/tesseract/tree/limitissuer. More work would be required to send a PR to limit the number of issuers being tracked and avoid unbounded memory growth (though this is somehow already limited by the number of roots accepted by TesseraCT). I'm thinking we could use a TwoQueueCache from https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/hashicorp/golang-lru/v2. There's non-trivial complexity!

Alternative solutions:

  1. Do nothing
  2. Monitor chain submission per issuer (but don't rate limit them)
  3. Enable TesseraCT to block submissions per issuer, and/or roots (related to #212)

@AlCutter @patflynn FYI

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

No repository file or test is named. Start by reviewing the linked TesseraCT limitissuer branch and the submission path, then compare the proposed rate limit with monitoring, blocking, and doing nothing. Done requires a decided approach, bounded issuer tracking, and agreement on the behavior described in this issue.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
go
Domain
backend
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
20/100

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