Regards
   Brian Carpenter
   http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7924-6182




On 18/09/2014 11:55, Acee Lindem (acee) wrote:
> See one inline belowŠ
> 
> On 9/17/14, 6:40 PM, "Brian E Carpenter" <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> 
>> On 18/09/2014 02:58, Michael Thomas wrote:
>>> On 09/16/2014 11:31 PM, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
>>>> As was presented in.. err, London?, shared secrets are bad. To really
>>>> do this properly, we need device specific keys and some kind of list
>>>> of "devices that are allowed to connect", perhaps by having their
>>>> public keys in HNCP. I don't know. I am no security expert, but I
>>>> believe we probably have to have two or three modes of security, one
>>>> being "unsecure" that is auto everything (will give scenarios like the
>>>> one Tim wrote about), one that is "shared secret", but where devices
>>>> need to be configured using this shared secret (protects against
>>>> accidents), and a third one where PKI is used, but where user policy
>>>> infrastructure is available. The third one greatly increases scope the
>>>> framework required to implement. I'm not sure it would even be HNCP
>>>> anymore, perhaps we need a wider view than what the HOMENET charter
>>>> has in it currently.
>>> Global symmetric keys certainly have their problems, but using public
>>> keys have their own.
>>> Namely, if I want to enroll a new device each other currently enrolled
>>> device needs to know about
>>> the public key of the new enrollee. For 2 devices, that's possibly
>>> manageable but for more I really
>>> don't want to run around my house looking for every homenet device to
>>> enroll the new one.
>>>
>>> If we were to do that, it might be nice to have a distributed database
>>> of homenet devices such that
>>> I only had to enroll it on one of my homenet devices, and then it's
>>> distributed to the rest.
>> I don't think that's a "nice to have". I think it's an unavoidable
>> requirement, and it has to require at most trivial human intervention.
>>
>> (Don't shoot me, but this happens to be a must-have for autonomic
>> networking too.)
> 
> I¹m not sure that this is a must-have but, if it were, could the autonomic
> networking solution be used for homenet?

Well, except that we don't have one yet ;-).

Really it's too soon to know, but the arguments about needing a strong
identity + trust model in the two cases are very similar. And some sort
of self-managing PKI seems to be needed.

However, I really don't want homenet to be stuck waiting for a non-existent
WG to get itself organized, so I think this is just something to keep in
mind for now.

   Brian

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