Dan Harkins <[email protected]> wrote:
    >   Think of whom you're trying to protect against. The first to have a
    > QC are most likely nation-states that you really aren't too happy with
    > today and will most likely be less happy with in 20 years. If we have
    > some specification on using sneaker-net with hex or bubble-babble or
    > base64, etc that's what's gonna be deployed and it's gonna be the
    > weakest link in this scheme. I dare say that your sneaker-net would
    > need to be protected by men with guns that you trust implicitly driving
    > armored cars to come close to the security you think you're getting by
    > mixing the PSK into the keying material.

I don't think your model (protected by men with guns) is necessarily wrong.
I am imagining Brinks trucks myself, but we can also consider a staring role
for Keanu Reeves... or Agent 86, as you wish.

    >   On top of that, I think it would be good to try and make sharing the
    > PSK as difficult as possible. If there are > 1 people running around

Hmm. My concern is more along the lines of: getting this PSK entered
correctly is difficult, so when the boss is breathing down your neck, you
simply turn off the mechanism.

    >   PKIX defined a symmetric key package and it has many options to
    > securely wrap an arbitrary symmetric key, or many symmetric keys in a
    > package. It can also include a key id to use when describing the
    > symmetric key. We should look at something like that. It's ASN.1 and
    > everyone hates ASN.1 but an alternative could be defined with JSON or
    > something like that. The symmetric key package can be deployed using
    > the EST extensions that Sean Turner has proposed-- you authenticate EST
    > using a certificate, the EST server uses your authenticated identity to
    > locate your package and sends it to you. Yes it requires you to
    > implement a whole bunch of other stuff but I think it's worth the price
    > we're placing on the PSK.

This sounds like a great idea.  I will even agree to eat the pre-established
ASN.1 here.  I had no preconceived notion as to the format, just that we have
a specific way to get the stuff in.

(I don't think, in a post-QM world, we can authenticate the EST with a
certificate though, but that's a detail. I think it's still an armored Brinks
truck with a thumb drive or whatever)

--
Michael Richardson <[email protected]>, Sandelman Software Works
 -= IPv6 IoT consulting =-



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