"Anders Rundgren" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> I don't believe in that model anymore.  3D offers so
> much more possibilities for integration in purchasing
> systems which the classic model cannot do.  Neither
> can AADS.  It is like "federation" for payments.

as an aside ... the threat and vulnerability analysis done by the
financial standards x9a10 working group (charged with preserving the
integrity of the financial infrastructure for all retail payments) in
the mid-90s, didn't find issues with trust, business, and/or message
flows of the existing iso 8583 standard transactions.

the issue in the x9.59 standards word
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/index.html#x959
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#privacy

was the treats and vulnerabilities in the authentication technology
and athat the integrity level has possibly eroded over the past 30
years or so (in the face of technology advances).

the primary issue was the authentication of the consumer for the
transaction. this cropped up in two different aspects

1) is the consumer originating the transaction, really the entity that
is authorized to perform transactions against the specific account

2) somewhat because of authentication integrity issues, starting at
least in the 90s, there was an increase in skimming and harvesting
... either direct skimming of the magnetic stripe information or
harvesting of account transaction databases ... both supporting later
counterfeiting activities enabling generation of fraudulent
transactions
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#harvest

the countermeasure corner stones of x9.59 then became:

1) use technology for drastically increasing the authentication
strength directly associated with transactions ... as a countermeasure
to not being sure that the entity originating the transaction is
really the entity authorized to perform transactions for that account.

2) business rule that PANs (account numbers) used in strongly
authenticated transactions aren't allowed to be used in poorly or
non-authentication transactions (or don't authorize poorly
authenticated transaction having a PAN that is identified for use only
in strongly authenticated transactions). this is a countermeasure to
the skimming/harvesting vulnerabilities and exploits.

there was a joke with regard to the second countermeasure corner stone
that you could blanket the world in miles deep cryptography and you
still couldn't contain the skimming/harvesting activities. the second
corner stone just removes skimming/harvesting as having any practical
benefit in support of crooks and fraudulent transactions. slightly
related post on security proportional to risk:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#61
recent similar posting in another thread:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005k.html#23
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm16.htm#20

having helped with the deployment of the e-commerce ssl based
infrastructure
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm5.htm#asrn2
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm5.htm#asrn3

we recognized a large number of situations where PKIs that had
originally been designed to address trust issues between relying
parties and other entities that had no prrevious contact ... were
being applied to environments that had long term and well established
trust and relationship management infrastructure (aka if i have a
relationship management infrastructure that provides long-term and
detailed trust history about a specific relationship ... then a PKI
becomes redundant and superfluous as a trust establishment mechanism).

In the AADS model
http://www.garilc.com/~lynn/index.html#aads
involving certificate-less public key operation
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#certless

we attempted to map publickey-based authentication technology into
existing and long-term business processes and relationship management
infrastructures.

the existing authentication landscape is largely shared-secret based
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#secret

where the same information that is used for originating a transaction
is also used for verifying a transaction. this opens up harvesting
vulnerabilities and treats against the verification repositories.

basically asymmetric cryptography is a technology involving pairs of
keys, data encoding by one key is decoded by the other key.

a business process has been defined for asymmetric cryptography where
one of the key pair is designated "public" and can be widely
distributed. The other of the key pair is designated "private" and
kept confidential and never divulged.

a futher business process has been defined call "digital signatures"
where a hash of some message or document is encoded with a private
key. later a relying party can recalculate the hash of the same
message or document, decode the digitial signatures with the
corresponding public key and compare the two hashes. if the two hashes
are the same ... then the relying party can assume:

1) the message/document hasn't been modified since being
digitally signed

2) "something you have" authentication, aka the originating entity has
access to, and use of the corresponding private key.

an additional business process was created called PKIs and
certification authorities that was targeted at the environment where a
relying party is dealing with first time communication with a stranger
and has no other recourse for trust establishment about the total
stranger. note however, that PKIs and certification authorities can be
shown to be redundant and superfluous in envrionments where the
relying party has long established business processes and trust
management infrastructures for dealing with pre-existing
relationships.

However, just because PKIs and certification authority business
processs can be shown to be redundant and superfluous in most existing
modern day business operations ... that doesn't preclude digital
signature technology being used (in a certificateless environment) as
a stronger form of authentication (relying on existing and long
estasblished relationship management processes for registering a
public key in lieu of shared secret based authentication material).

leveraging long established relationship management infrastructures
for registering public key authentication material in lieu of
shared-secret authentication material (and use of public key oriented
authentication) is a countermeasure to many kinds of harvesting and
skimming vulnerabilities and threats. Many of the identity theft
reports result from havesting/skimming of common, static,
shared-secret authentication material for later use in fraudulent
transactions. The advantage of public key based authentication
material, is that while it can be used for authentication purposes, it
doesn't have the short-coming of also being useable for originating
fraudulent transactions and/or impersonation.

-- 
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
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