Subject: Re: Software for PKI

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2001 09:15:41 -0700

There seems to be a lot of focus on "trust" once a certificate has been
manufactored .... and possibly "trust hierachies" of certification
authorities, and CRLs and other stuff for the offline world design point.
However the "official" word in CA is certification (not certificate), i.e.
in general TTPs  certify/validate something prior to certificate
manufactoring. However, it is hard to make the trust level of the
information in a certificate at a higher level than the trust level in the
authoritative agency responsible for the information being
certified/validated. If the authoritative agency has integrity issues ....
then those trust issues propogate thru-out the whole trust chain
(regardless of any obfuscating with fancy mathematics that might go on).

following refs including postings in the n.g. on this subject a couple
years ago:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#sslcerts

the claim ... as before ... in the domain name infrastructure there have
been issues raised regarding integrity ... with SSL domain name
certificates as a solution. However, SSL domain name certificates derive
their (real) trust root from the same place the domain name infrastructure
derives its trust root (since that is the authoritative agency that is
responsible for the validity of the information and which TTPs have to
validate/certify with as to the correctness of the information they are
certifying prior to manufactoring the certificate).

The claim is that any "fixing" necessary of that trust root that goes on
because of the issues that TTP CAs may have .... also goes a long way to
eliminating the need for having those same TTP CAs issue SSL domain name
certificates ... aka catch22 ... the fix for SSL domain name certificates
also goes a long way to eliminating the need for SSL domain name
certificates.

__________________

[email-masked] wrote

If you want to talk about chain of trust ... then the root for SSL domain
name certificates start with those databases ... since they are the
authoritative databases for validating a SSL domain name certificate
request. In effect a CA ... certification authority ... is "certifying"
some piece of information as part of manufactoring a certificate. A CA's
certifying domain name information for a SSL domain name certificate
request consists of checking/validating with the authoritative agency
responsible for the information that is being certified. If that
authoritative agency has integrity issues, then the validating/checking has
intetrity issues, then the certification has integrity issues .... and we
aren't even to the point of actually manufactoring the certificate.

---

From: Eric Rescorla <[email-masked]>
Date: 08 Nov 2001 08:25:56 -0800

> certifying prior to manufactoring the certificate).
Once again, this confuses the integrity of the DNS with the integrity
of the database on which the DNS is based. SSL domain name
certificates are intended to solve (well, workaround) the former
problem, which we know to be really serious. The solution for the
latter problem is good operational procedures at the name registrars
and CAs.

-Ekr

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