Subject: FIPS 140-2 Compliant On-line Key Provisioning

From: "Anders Rundgren" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 25 Jan 2009 11:51:13 +0100

FIPS 140-2 Compliant On-line Key Provisioning

What does that mean?  My interpretation of this is that the characteristics ("quality") of a device's cryptographic module must be verifiable in a secure manner by an issuer without requiring visual inspection or OOB-acquired knowledge of the device in question.

Currently no such thing exists because there haven't really been any requirements for such facilities since most critical schemes rely on physical distribution of smart card tokens.  However, as recently shown in the news, even the US president wants to use a mobile device for communication:
http://news.cnet.com/obamas-new-blackberry-the-nsas-secure-pda

In order to make this scale better (not everyone gets the same attention as Mr. Obama), I have since some time back been plotting with a protocol that should support FIPS 140-2 measurements over the air.  There are other things needed (and included) as well but to not unnecessary complicate interpretation, this particular feature has so far been described separately:
http://webpki.org/papers/keygen2/keygen2-fips140-2.pdf

How does this relate to PKIX?  I leave that to you as a group to consider.  My current plan is making this (in due time) available on Google's Android because open source seems to be the fastest route these days.

An observation made during the development that you may find interesting (or alarming), is that there seems to be a requirement that the cryptographic module and the protocol are tightly matched in order to achieve anything of this kind.

Anders Rundgren

FIPS 140-2:
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/fips/fips140-2/fips1402.pdf