On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 1:14 PM, Trevor Vaughan <tvaug...@onyxpoint.com>wrote:

> I have no issue with the PSK technique BUT, I do have a couple
> questions/concerns:
>
> 1) Please keep the old syntax in place so that users don't have to run
> about modifying scripts everywhere. Internal command aliases should
> work fine.
>
> 2) You say that we shouldn't be trusting the network (fine), but now
> we're to distribute a PSK via an unsigned format (tar) over what
> medium? If you don't have some sort of authenticator/identifier for
> your clients, anyone on the network could make the connection and snag
> the PSK, though it may be encrypted with HTTPS or somesuch.
>

We have a number of concerns internally about literal pre-shared keys and
you've identified them directly.  We think pre-shared-keys will degrade our
security model of public key cryptography if used improperly.

As a result, we haven't fully scrubbed the term "PSK" from all of our notes
and material on Puppet Sites but we're thinking that it might be a token or
another public key itself that doesn't degrade our public key model to that
of a shared secret model.


> This is (unfortunately) just a hard problem if you can't trust your
> network to some degree.
>

Exactly.  We're planning to address this problem with Sites by making it
easier to setup Puppet in a secure way while also preserving our "secure
out of the box" implementation of x.509 and trusted third party public key
authentication.

-Jeff

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