Subject: Re: UK: PKI "not working"

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 09:47:33 -0600

[email-masked] on 6/23/2003 1:44 am wrote:

I fully agree with Mitchell's conclusions of what PKI is good for as it
stands today.  To be able to serve millions of citizens at thousands of
independent e-government portals, either requires TTP identity-portals
(using SAML etc.), or client-side PKI using TTP CAs.  No other methods have
proven to be technically or economically feasible.

I cannot verify any major 100000-foot legal problems, but quite a bunch of
down-to-earth (zero-foot?) problems like "lousy browsers", and the lack of
ubiquitous, secure, and mobile key-containers.  IMO, it is really only the
latter that hampers enterprise-PKIs as a userid/password-replacement on a
wider scale.  This problem is neither a standards problem, nor a technical
ditto.   It is rather an example of blatant stupidity among "certain
manufacturers".

Regarding "legally binding", virtually anything that offers reasonable
technical integrity is likely to be applicable as evidence in a court trial
in most countries.  Examples of this are phone-operators' call-lists that
may prove "association" or DNA-fingerprints that may prove "It wasn't me".
What is a bit puzzling is that non-PKI e-solutions never seem to be
questioned regarding their.merits in courts...

A "legal" aspect that though really is an issue, is TTP CA liability.
However, this is mostly a US issue where suing people is a part of the
system.  I believe this will have a negative impact on PKI usage in the US,
unless there is a way to automatically accomplish what Identrus et al
"achieves" by requiring relying parties to sign agreements freeing the
issuer from liability.  Here I would like to address the PKIX WG with a
request for some kind of remedy.

Anders

============

I believe it is the electronic signature act ... and there are other parts
of the same bill. it allows various kinds of electronic  marks .... but the
main issue for a legal signature (& non-repudiation) is demonstration of
some sort of intent, agreement, etc. The EULAs that require clicking in
various places after reading variouis directions meet more of the criteria
of demonstrating intent & agreement than does almost all of the CA PKIs
that effectively don't enforce any process after the certificate has been
returned to the key owner.

The main issues addressed by the vairous public key digital signatures are
message authentication and integrity ..... as been repeated in numerous
past threads involving non-repudiation ... there is still an enormous gap
between message authentication/integrity and non-repudiation.

The big issue of TTP CA PKI and legaly issue is that  almost all legal
relationship (like contracts) are between two parties where one has paid
money and received something in return.  That describes the relationship
between the TTP CA PKI entity and the key owner. The legal objective seems
to be to create some legal fiction that involves a relationship between the
TTP CA PKI and the relying-party. The traditonal legal relationship doesn't
apply to anything between the TTP CA PKI and the relying-party. As been
mentioned in numerous, repeated threads on this subject in the past, GSA
manufactored such a relationship by some sort of contract between GSA and
the TTP CA PKI's ...  and GSA and the relying-parties .... so that the
facade of legal relationship between the relying parties and the TTPs. For
the most part, the traditional TTP CA PKI's enforce little or no process
after the certificate has been retruned to the key-owner.

Note that the GSA model is similar to the business/legal relationships
established as part of the online debit/credit infrastructures. The
debit/credit infrastructure used to be an offline, manual process. Starting
in the mid-70s, they skipped over the TTP CA PKI paradigm of offline,
electronic process and went directly to an online, electronic process. For
the debit/credit infrastructure the paradigm represented by TTP CA PKI
represents a 30 yuear old technology option that they decided to skip.

somewhat related is the recent thread on confusing authentication and
identification:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay11.htm#66 Confusing Authentication and
Identiification?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay11.htm#67 Confusing Authentication and
Identiification?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay11.htm#68 Confusing Authentication and
Identiification?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay11.htm#69 Confusing Authentication and
Identiification?

past threads with mention of pair-wise GSA contracts with both TTPs and
relying-parties created
some sort of legal relationship between relying-parties and TTPs:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm12.htm#22 draft-ietf-pkix-warranty-ext-01
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm12.htm#41 I-D
ACTION:draft-ietf-pkix-sim-00.txt
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm12.htm#42
draft-ietf-pkix-warranty-extn-01.txt
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm14.htm#37 Keyservers and Spam

misc. past threads that reference non-repudiation as well listing other
threads on non-repudiation:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm12.htm#37 Legal entities who sign
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm12.htm#64 Invisible Ink, E-signatures slow
to broadly catch on (addenda)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm13.htm#20 surrogate/agent addenda (long)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay10.htm#76 Invisible Ink, E-signatures slow
to broadly catch on (addenda)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001g.html#61 PKI/Digital signature doesn't
work
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001g.html#62 PKI/Digital signature doesn't
work
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#7 PKI/Digital signature doesn't work
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#16 Net banking, is it safe???
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#36 Net banking, is it safe???
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#57 E-commerce security????
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001j.html#45 OT - Internet Explorer V6.0
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003h.html#38 entity authentication with
nonrepudiation
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#35 electronic-ID and key-generation

--
Internet trivia, 20th anv: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm