On 28 October 2014 06:37, Dearlove, Christopher (UK) <[email protected]> wrote: > From my perspective, and with support shown in the WG, this is an option that > several people want. The need for a trusted authority is a minus point, but > acceptable by some users and should not be blocked because it is not ideal > for everyone. (The only other so far standardised options, based on shared > keys, also are not ideal for everyone.) If there were a method that retained > all of the advantages of this approach and removed the need to trust the > authority, that would be a different matter, but I do not believe such a > method is known. Note that this approach has at least one advantage Martin > had not picked up on.
I'm not sure that I'll be able to close on this quickly, since all I have from Christopher's description is a distinct vibe of snake-oil, which is very unfair and almost certainly hugely inaccurate. I don't believe for a minute that this is what we're talking about, so I must be misunderstanding something. As I understand the information flow, new nodes acquire a private key from some trusted source, which is constructed in such a way that they are able to make assertions about their identity (an IP address, if I understand correctly) that will be accepted by other nodes who also trust that authority. I know just enough about crypto to know that something like this might be possible, but it's outside of my direct knowledge. What I was thinking was that if you go to the trouble of using asymmetric crypto, then you already have the pieces to build a system that doesn't require sharing of private keying material between any two parties. Then trust can be disconnected from the authority to some extent (you might trust X because of previous things X did, whereas now, you don't know for certain that X is the same X because the authority might have given the keys to a new X). All that requires is that there is a two way exchange with the authority rather than a one way exchange between the device and the authority. I freely admit that I don't understand whether there might be some restrictions on the construction of the private key such that it binds some additional information, maybe you can explain. (Small words, I'm not a cryptographer, I just use it.) _______________________________________________ Gen-art mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/gen-art
