Re: [Monotone-devel] WARNING: ~/.monotone/keys CONSIDERED HARMFUL

2008-10-20 Thread Thomas Keller
Hi Robert! Sorry to read that you've lost your keys during upgrade - no chance to have a backup laying around somewhere? You wrote: 1) It presumes that any given login ID and key id uniquely identifies a database. To whit mtn --db Employer1.db db migrate mtn --db Employer2.db db migrate

[Monotone-devel] Re: hypothetical - future-dated certs (Re: Monotone Security)

2008-10-20 Thread Markus Wanner
Hi, Daniel Carosone wrote: I'm not so sure.. I'd happily go for 'strange' or some other word, rather than 'wrong'. At the very least, I'd like to try and work through all the cases we can think of where this might arise, and just confirm whether a sensible or legitimate interpretation

Re: [Monotone-devel] WARNING: ~/.monotone/keys CONSIDERED HARMFUL

2008-10-20 Thread Daniel Carrera
Ethan Blanton wrote: Robert White spake unto us the following wisdom: Daniel Carrera wrote: Robert White wrote: or consider the need to have two or more development stations that _can_ _not_ reach each other over a network, so sneaker-netting a secondary store would be required. (and so on).

Re: [Monotone-devel] WARNING: ~/.monotone/keys CONSIDERED HARMFUL

2008-10-20 Thread Daniel Carrera
Robert White wrote: Why would I want to do that? The question isn't whether _you_ would want to do that, its whether or not a non-trivial number of users might... Have you honestly never heard of a contract that requires complete surrender or destroy of materials etc? That is the default for

[Monotone-devel] date certs on net.venge.monotone

2008-10-20 Thread Markus Wanner
Hi, as mentioned in other threads already, I'm currently analyzing date certs and comparing them against the revision ancestry. The obvious first test database includes all of net.venge.monotone* (and nothing else). At the time of testing, it had 14156 revisions with 17737 relations between them

Re: [Monotone-devel] date certs on net.venge.monotone

2008-10-20 Thread Bruce Stephens
Markus Wanner [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: [...] What surprised me about the pidgin repository is, that there are some date certs with six digits (!) for milliseconds in the date, i.e.: 2006-11-01T21:39:36.807940 IIRC Tailor did that at one point, so likely that's a result of converting from

[Monotone-devel] Re: WARNING: ~/.monotone/keys CONSIDERED HARMFUL

2008-10-20 Thread Lapo Luchini
Robert White wrote: Howdy all, I don't know who decided that .monotone/keys was a good idea but it is a DISASTER for me. For various reasons It is desirable to use the same real world identity, q.v. [EMAIL PROTECTED], in several different databases with different keys behind them for

Re: [Monotone-devel] WARNING: ~/.monotone/keys CONSIDERED HARMFUL

2008-10-20 Thread Daniel Carrera
Ethan Blanton wrote: Monotone generally settles on security first; many users (myself included) consider this a good thing. I second that. Security is one of the most interesting features of Monotone. It's what brought me to this list. A single, well-known key store is much easier to keep

Re: [Monotone-devel] WARNING: ~/.monotone/keys CONSIDERED HARMFUL

2008-10-20 Thread Timothy Brownawell
On Mon, 2008-10-20 at 10:57 +0200, Markus Wanner wrote: Hi, Robert White wrote: Try things like wanting to be able to revoke/destroy one key when the contract is over etc. I fail to see how that's even possible in a distributed environment. The only thing one single party can do is

Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: hypothetical - future-dated certs (Re: Monotone Security)

2008-10-20 Thread Daniel Carosone
On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 10:31:32AM +0200, Markus Wanner wrote: In particular, my concern is that despite agreeing and acknowleding that there can't be a global clock, warnings or errors like this help to encourage in the users' minds that there is a global clock anyway. Can we really get

Re: [Monotone-devel] date certs on net.venge.monotone

2008-10-20 Thread Daniel Carosone
On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 10:49:12AM +0200, Markus Wanner wrote: (Yes, this currently includes counting dependent revisions with equal timestamps as invalid, which is certainly bogus, just highly unlikely). If we're only storing up to seconds, it could happen readily for a multi-way merge that

Re: [Monotone-devel] WARNING: ~/.monotone/keys CONSIDERED HARMFUL

2008-10-20 Thread Marcin W. DÄ…browski
Hi all. I was lurking from time to time in this thread, and... I also have an idea to help Monotone migrate from its current system to a PGP-like system: Internally Monotone would have to use the key fingerprint, there's no getting around that. Would it be ever possible to have an option to

Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: hypothetical - future-dated certs (Re: Monotone Security)

2008-10-20 Thread Markus Wanner
Hi, Daniel Carosone wrote: That's kind of my point about the separate date certs we have currently. You propose a mechanism whereby an out-of-order or future-dated date cert would be considered invalid and untrusted -- instead of now where it's trusted but essentially ignored (other than

Re: [Monotone-devel] date certs on net.venge.monotone

2008-10-20 Thread Markus Wanner
Hi, Daniel Carosone wrote: If we're only storing up to seconds, it could happen readily for a multi-way merge that created several intermediate merge nodes in the one command. Sure. See the long list of revisions I've posted, there's one such case within net.venge.monotone*:

Re: [Monotone-devel] WARNING: ~/.monotone/keys CONSIDERED HARMFUL

2008-10-20 Thread Ethan Blanton
Daniel Carrera spake unto us the following wisdom: Robert was asking for clarification, which is a reasonable thing to do. There is no need to be snide or rude about it. If you have a legitimate use case, and can articulate it, then software can be built to accomodate it. If you cannot

Re: [Monotone-devel] WARNING: ~/.monotone/keys CONSIDERED HARMFUL

2008-10-20 Thread Markus Wanner
Hi, Timothy Brownawell wrote: It's entirely possible to destroy the private half, since only one person should ever have that. And being sure in this case sounds more like a matter of contracts rather than technology. Something can be useful even when technology can't guarantee it. Good

Re: [Monotone-devel] WARNING: ~/.monotone/keys CONSIDERED HARMFUL

2008-10-20 Thread hendrik
On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 10:05:11AM +0200, Thomas Keller wrote: Hi Robert! Sorry to read that you've lost your keys during upgrade - no chance to have a backup laying around somewhere? Faint hope: Is there any chance that the other keys are there somewhere, but monotone just uses the

Re: [Monotone-devel] WARNING: ~/.monotone/keys CONSIDERED HARMFUL

2008-10-20 Thread Daniel Carrera
Robert White wrote: Claiming it as a security action is a red herring. The key files are encrypted anyway and physical access to the database is just as likely-or-unlikely as physical access to the keydir. Other security products consider it very bad practice to distribute private keys, even

Re: [Monotone-devel] WARNING: ~/.monotone/keys CONSIDERED HARMFUL

2008-10-20 Thread Markus Wanner
Hi, Robert White wrote: Try things like wanting to be able to revoke/destroy one key when the contract is over etc. I fail to see how that's even possible in a distributed environment. The only thing one single party can do is distrust a key. There's no way to make sure the other party

Re: [Monotone-devel] date certs on net.venge.monotone

2008-10-20 Thread Ethan Blanton
Bruce Stephens spake unto us the following wisdom: Markus Wanner [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: What surprised me about the pidgin repository is, that there are some date certs with six digits (!) for milliseconds in the date, i.e.: 2006-11-01T21:39:36.807940 IIRC Tailor did that at one

[Monotone-devel] Re: WARNING: ~/.monotone/keys CONSIDERED HARMFUL

2008-10-20 Thread Lapo Luchini
Marcin W. DÄ…browski wrote: Would it be ever possible to have an option to use external tools for signing certs? I.e. GnuPG signatures? Not right now (and it's not planned, AFAIK), but you can do of course things that pretty much guarantee the same thing: 1. GPG-sign your monotone public key:

Re: [Monotone-devel] Summit thoughts - and changes?

2008-10-20 Thread Matthew A. Nicholson
On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 11:12:08AM +1100, Daniel Carosone wrote: [...] Discuss. :) -- Dan. I think this is a great idea. Why don't we set a date for the next virtual summit. Perhaps the first full weekend in December (the 5th-7th)? Or is that too close to thanksgiving (US) or

Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: WARNING: ~/.monotone/keys CONSIDERED HARMFUL

2008-10-20 Thread Brian May
Lapo Luchini wrote: OK, using (the same) e-mail addresses in different keys may pose additional hurdles, but why using e-mail addresses in the first place? You need to use email addresses in order to answer the question Who signed this revision? Unfortunately, what we have is a poor

Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: WARNING: ~/.monotone/keys CONSIDERED HARMFUL

2008-10-20 Thread Brian May
Lapo Luchini wrote: 1. GPG-sign your monotone public key: this way people that trust your GPG key know that they can trust your monotone signatures (if they trust monotone itself, that is) You still need some way of being able to tell that the revision was signed with the same key that was

Re: [Monotone-devel] WARNING: ~/.monotone/keys CONSIDERED HARMFUL

2008-10-20 Thread Brian May
Daniel Carrera wrote: I think that Ethan's idea has a lot of merit. Btw, PGP allows a user to have multiple keys associated with the same name and email. To help the user distinguish between keys. If you list them, they look like this: Daniel Carrera (Personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Daniel