-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 9/7/13 9:06 PM, Christian Huitema wrote: >> Pairwise shared secrets are just about the only thing that >> scales worse than public key distribution by way of PGP key >> fingerprints on business cards. > The equivalent of CAs in an >> all-symmetric world is KDCs. Instead of having the power to >> enable an active attack on you today, KDCs have the power to >> enable a passive attack on you forever. If we want secure crypto >> that can be used by everyone, with minimal trust, public key is >> the only way to do it. >> > > I am certainly not going to advocate Internet-scale KDC. But what > if the application does not need to scale more than a "network of > friends?"
A thousand times yes. One doesn't need to communicate with several billion people, and we don't need systems that scale up that high. Most folks just want to interact (chat, share photos, voice/video conference, etc.) with their friends and family and colleagues -- maybe 50 - 500 people. IMHO we only need to scale up that high for secure communication. (I'm talking about individual communication, not enterprise stuff.) What about talking with someone new? Well, we can design separate protocols that enable you to be introduced to someone you haven't communicated with before (we already do that with things like FOAF, LinkedIn, Facebook). Part of that introduction might involve learning the new person's public key from someone you already trust (no need for Internet-scale certificate authorities). You could use that public key for bootstrapping the pairwise shared secrets. Another attractive aspect of a network of friends is that it can be used for mix networking (route messages through your friends) and for things like less-than-completely-public media relays and data proxies for voice, video, file transfer, etc. And such relays might just live on those little home devices that Perry is talking about, separate from the cloud. Peter - -- Peter Saint-Andre https://stpeter.im/ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG/MacGPG2 v2.0.19 (Darwin) Comment: GPGTools - http://gpgtools.org Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://www.enigmail.net/ iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJSLQDNAAoJEOoGpJErxa2phHAQAJ76DfrFmz6Sv+HkczOgxJA1 v0kqmLphDhzgT/9eUiF1cCkowF0HE1l84DTuMefrwT2DmOLZJVQANy0Tg/CzWLRu 3JBDkPRQ/cdlfDyy1ZHNb4bsGWyxHIXViQg2sNQZ9KB8yRF4pouYewXOpoJDIabN G40mVlWzuO5cTUWLColwDCaoR20Q+04Ln19BAiJi58d2UT4c55ZyF45hbbQSYL7T bl1JQkvZdtp2Syn4DaGS+WmCUIGsv5KpdXmZv0ljKXoRqsOW7GjaiaQz84MMMQg9 EHZIDnAetTXdfbEki8AsO5PlGRmi944tHL7DtvXJKd76CY5dIZ6kywMU2g+/LrIn 1uWwTSogu4n4yiQrLyYfOnsttkzJWC9BE9YJXXeH0IN6VRvkC710zphCZLVw6LZJ TsNvtskigIQ9jnPO1le1zkHIagXHhns6fVTURFuWd9ZHCOOdbNT7h6Lj+I8OGCkp KFAbRfXzAQDZgVrl42IZ8Sn4DioCLGbscP3maU/C8J3s1+ega3lxfX3DNbJpX+id FtnaXHfushv9xIkoNT/sBJrg79BblU5ZOH/GUBMwV+rFlWA0ofvIrhkaSnRUPFTI gq2C913YWQfyybolHKRNsZ/JpYjarZAJ5eJdW9ALo3xrCxlTr/EcIek7hCVKBK1o d7FvIpkYoexTO08AKfcZ =GRXj -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ The cryptography mailing list cryptography@metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
