On Jul 28, 2010, at 8:21 33AM, Ben Laurie wrote: > On 28/07/2010 13:18, Peter Gutmann wrote: >> Ben Laurie <b...@links.org> writes: >> >>> I find your response strange. You ask how we might fix the problems, then >>> you >>> respond that since the world doesn't work that way right now, the fixes >>> won't >>> work. Is this just an exercise in one-upmanship? You know more ways the >>> world >>> is broken than I do? >> >> It's not just that the world doesn't work that way now, it's quite likely >> that >> it'll never work that way (for the case of PKI/revocations mentioned in the >> message, not the original SNI). We've been waiting for between 20 and 30 >> years (depending on what you define as the start date) for PKI to start >> working, and your reponse seems to indicate that we should wait even harder. >> >> If I look at the mechanisms we've got now, I can identify that commercial >> PKI >> isn't helping, and revocations aren't helping, and work around that. I'm >> after effective practical solutions, not just "a solution exists, QED" >> solutions. > > The core problem appears to be a lack of will to fix the problems, not a > lack of feasible technical solutions. > > I don't know why it should help that we find different solutions for the > world to ignore?
There seem to be at least three different questions here: bad code (i.e., that Windows doesn't check the revocation status properly), the UI issue, and the conceptual question of what should replace the current PKI+{CRL,OCSP} model. For the last issue, I'd note that using pki instead of PKI (i.e., many different per-realm roots, authorization certificates rather than identity certificates, etc.) doesn't help: Realtek et al. still have no better way or better incentive to revoke their own widely-used keys. --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majord...@metzdowd.com