On Wednesday 14 March 2007 12:38, Greg Twyford wrote: > I'm reading Peter Guttmann's article 'PKI - not dead, just resting' at > the moment. > > www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/notdead.pdf > > How could anyone be cynical about implementing PKI?
Maybe you haven't been around indeed when we discussed it. A public key infrastructure (PKI) is either a hierarchy or a web of trust, where users delegate confirmation of authenticity of their public key to either the community at large (web of trust) or to a specific authority or hierarchy of authorities (hierarchic model), while they keep the private part oftheir keys absolutely private (as the name suggests) HeSA is a monstrosity in this context as they want to be both certifying authority (the guys who confirm that the key claiming to be Joe Blogg's public key is really Joe Blogg's public key) AS WELL as the masters of all private kes (namely by having a monopoly of key generation By doing this, nobody can be sure anymore whether a key claiming to be JOe Blogg's key is a) really Joe Blogg's public key b) HeSA usurping Joe Blogg's identity c) HeSA' incompetence having allowed third party to access Joe Blogg's private key and hence a third party usurping Joe Blogg's identity Now, we might implicitly trust a government agency (would we ever?) not to do b), and carefully watch their employees to prevent b) - but due to their very act of turning the whole concept arse up, c) becomes a likely scenario in my eyes. Anybody who doesn't even grasp the very core principle of any form of asymmetric cryptography, namely NOBODY (!!!) gets to see the private key but the owner, is de facto incompetent in my eyes. I do understand that for some people generating their own keys is just too cumbersome, and they absolutely trust the nice HeSA guys with their lives and bank accounts - fine. May they never get disappointed. Ma HeSA enjoy providing this services to those. But how DARE they trying to force this atrocity down everybody's throat without offering a decent alternative??? Let's assume sudden divine intervention creates a spark of light in the dark minds of the HeSA bureaucrats and suddenly they do allow doing it properly - another problem remains (or maybe it has been fixed in the interim?): they based their system on dodgy hardware and dodgy drivers, with very limited portability and no transparency, Same as my own private key is none of their business, so it is none of their business how I chose to store my private key, and there is absolutely no rationale why to enforce a silly dodgy program library for something that is a STANDARD process for which plenty of tried and proven and tested (eg OpenSSL, whcih can do everything X.509 they possibly could ever want and runs on anything starting from my PDA to my Beowuf cluster of mixed platforms) Thus, IMHO, HeSA remains frantically giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a corpse where even the maggots have long lost interest in. Real PKI, done properly, is great though. Why, my preferred operating system (Debian based Linux ) wouldn't even exist without! Horst _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
