On Jul 28, 2010, at 11:25 AM, Perry E. Metzger wrote:

> On Wed, 28 Jul 2010 11:20:52 -0500 Nicolas Williams
> <nicolas.willi...@oracle.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 12:18:56PM -0400, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
>>> Again, I understand that in a technological sense, in an ideal
>>> world, they would be equivalent. However, the big difference,
>>> again, is that you can't run Kerberos with no KDC, but you can
>>> run a PKI without an OCSP server. The KDC is impossible to leave
>>> out of the system. That is a really nice technological feature.
>> 
>> Whether PKI can run w/o OCSP is up to the relying parties.  Today,
>> because OCSP is an afterthought, they have little choice.
> 
> My mother relies on many certificates. Can she make a decision on
> whether or not her browser uses OCSP for all its transactions?

That might depend.  I tell Firefox to use OCSP if a responder is referenced in 
the certificate, and I check that little checkbox that says "When an OCSP 
connection fails, treat the certificate as invalid."

True, if you don't have that checkbox marked, then Firefox will take a failed 
OCSP check attempt (connection refused, socket timeout, etc) as a success.  
What it ought to do is try the CRL(s) listed in the certificate too, and if 
both don't work then it really ought to error.

Paul Tiemann
(DigiCert)
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