About that Mighty Fortress... What's it look like?

Assume, contra facto, that in some future iteration of PKI, it works, and works very well. What the heck does it look like? At a guess Anybody can create a key (or key pair). They get one clearly marked private, which they're supposed to keep, and one clearly marked public, which

Is this the first ever practically-deployed use of a threshold scheme?

Apparently the DNS root key is protected by what sounds like a five-of-seven threshold scheme, but the description is a bit unclear. Does anyone know more? (Oh, and for people who want to quibble over practically-deployed, I'm not aware of any real usage of threshold schemes for anything, at

Re: About that Mighty Fortress... What's it look like?

On Fri, 30 Jul 2010 19:40:49 -0700 Ray Dillinger b...@sonic.net wrote: Assume, contra facto, that in some future iteration of PKI, it works, and works very well. What the heck does it look like? At a guess Anybody can create a key (or key pair). They get one clearly marked private,

Re: init.d/urandom : saving random-seed

Hi Henrique -- This is to answer the excellent questions you asked at http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=587665#81 Since that bug is now closed (as it should be), and since these questions are only tangentially related to that bug anyway, I am emailing you directly. Feel free

Five Theses on Security Protocols

Inspired by recent discussion, these are my theses, which I hereby nail upon the virtual church door: 1 If you can do an online check for the validity of a key, there is no need for a long-lived signed certificate, since you could simply ask a database in real time whether the holder of the

Re: A mighty fortress is our PKI, Part II

At 07:16 AM 7/28/2010, Ben Laurie wrote: SSH does appear to have got away without revocation, though the nature of the system is s.t. if I really wanted to revoke I could almost always contact the users and tell them in person. This doesn't scale very well to SSL-style systems. Unfortunately,

Re: Five Theses on Security Protocols

corollary to security proportional to risk is parameterized risk management ... where variety of technologies with varying integrity levels can co-exist within the same infrastructure/framework. transactions exceeding particularly technology risk/integrity threshold may still be approved given

Re: Five Theses on Security Protocols

Nice theses. I'm looking forward to the other 94. The first one is a nice summary of why DKIM might succeed in e-mail security where S/MIME failed. (Succeed as in, people actually use it.) 2 A third party attestation, e.g. any certificate issued by any modern CA, is worth exactly as much as

Re: Five Theses on Security Protocols

Perry E. Metzger pe...@piermont.com writes: Inspired by recent discussion, these are my theses, which I hereby nail upon the virtual church door: Are we allowed to play peanut gallery for this? 1 If you can do an online check for the validity of a key, there is no need for a long-lived signed

Re: Is this the first ever practically-deployed use of a threshold scheme?

On 31 jul 2010, at 08.44, Peter Gutmann wrote: Apparently the DNS root key is protected by what sounds like a five-of-seven threshold scheme, but the description is a bit unclear. Does anyone know more? The DNS root key is stored in HSMs. The key backups (maintained by ICANN) are encrypted

Re: Five Theses on Security Protocols

Usability engineering requires empathy. Isn't it interesting that nerds built themselves a system, SSH, that mostly adheres to Perry's theses? We nerds have empathy for ourselves. But when it comes to a system for other people, we suddenly lose all empathy and design a system that ignores Perry's