Subject: RE: Software for PKI

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2001 09:20:24 -0700

The database(s) have to be armored and the procedures fixed .... and at
least one of the proposals (on behalf of TTP trusted operation, if nothing
else) is to institute public key registration and public key signed
transactions to help address the integrity issue (which has to be fixed for
the TTP CAs ... if nobody else). Note that since the signed transactions go
directly to the authoritative agency that has registered the keys .... the
associated signed transactions don't require that certificates be appended
to such transactions .... since the authoritative agency already has the
public keys and all the information contained in any such certificate
(making the appending of certificates to such transactions, redundant,
superfulous, and unnecessary).

Adding keys and distributing them within the domain name infrastructure, in
effect, is already supported (mechanically), since DNS already supports
that for arbritrary information.

The remaining issue is the real live operation. The current certificate
world isn't a real PKI ... it is simply certificate manufactoring. It
doesn't actual provide infrastructure management of distributed information
(something that DNS already supports). The issue then is how hard is it to
add incremental integrity to all (or at least some) DNS transactions. That
is compared against adding all the stuff to the current certificate
infrastructure for a real-live PKI ..... say for instance, things like
guarenteed delivery and receipt of CRL to every entity on the face of the
earth that might be faced with relying on a certificate. For instance, my
understanding that after the Verisign issuing the Microsoft certificate,
Microsoft is distributing software updates to all clients in the world that
has special code specific for recognizing the invalid certificates.

[email-masked] at 11/7/2001 9:34 pm wrote

The security of the database is fundamentally a non-technical problem
and I don't believe that putting public keys in the DB will help. It
will always be possible for someone to socially engineer the DB
maintainers into contaminating the database. The defense against
that (to the extent there is one) is good administrative policies.

-Ekr

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From: Eric Rescorla <[email-masked]>
Date: 08 Nov 2001 09:39:43 -0800

[email-masked] writes:
> The database(s) have to be armored and the procedures fixed ....
Of course.

> that for arbritrary information.
Let me know when you've got clients and servers that actually know
how to read this new data format and we'll talk.

> world isn't a real PKI ... it is simply certificate manufactoring.
Yes, that's true. So? It's still better than nothing which is what
we had before.

-Ekr

-- 
[Eric Rescorla                                   [email-masked]]
                http://www.rtfm.com/