| By the way, it seems like one thing that might help with client certs
| is if they were treated a bit like cookies. Today, a website can set
| a cookie in your browser, and that cookie will be returned every time
| you later visit that website. This all happens automatically. Imagine
| if a website could instruct your browser to transparently generate a
| public/private keypair for use with that website only and send the
| public key to that website. Then, any time that the user returns to
| that website, the browser would automatically use that private key to
| authenticate itself. For instance, boa.com might instruct my browser
| to create one private key for use with *.boa.com; later,
| citibank.com could instruct my browser to create a private key for
| use with *.citibank.com. By associating the private key with a specific
| DNS domain (just as cookies are), this means that the privacy
| implications of client authentication would be comparable to the
| privacy implications of cookies. Also, in this scheme, there wouldn't
| be any need to have your public key signed by a CA; the site only needs
| to know your public key (e.g., your browser could send self-signed
| certs), which eliminates the dependence upon the third-party CAs.
| Any thoughts on this?
While trying to find something else, I came across the following
reference:
Title: Sender driven certification enrollment system
Document Type and Number: United States Patent 6651166
Link to this page: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6651166.html
Abstract:
A sender driven certificate enrollment system and methods of its
use are provided, in which a sender controls the generation of a
digital certificate that is used to encrypt and send a document
to a recipient in a secure manner. The sender compares
previously stored recipient information to gathered information
from the recipient. If the information matches, the sender
transfers key generation software to the recipient, which
produces the digital certificate, comprising a public and
private key pair. The sender can then use the public key to
encrypt and send the document to the recipient, wherein the
recipient can use the matching private key to decrypt the
document.
This was work done a Xerox. I was trying to find a different report
at Xerox in response to Peter Gutmann's comment that certificate aren't
used because they are impractical/unusable. Parc has done some wonderful
work on deal with those problems. See:
http://www.parc.com/research/projects/usablesecurity/wireless.html
Not "Internet scale", but in an enterprise, it should work.
-- Jerry
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