Re: [Atoca] Remarks on the security discussion today

Hi Hannes,

Thanks for putting this together.  It's a pretty good summary of the discussion.

--Martin

On 2011-04-01 at 06:35:48, Hannes Tschofenig wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> in the discussions today a few interesting remarks were raised. I 
> wanted to share them with you. Richard, Martin and Cullen listed two 
> aspects that need to be described in the requirements/architecture 
> document, namely
> 
> (1) How does the recipient/receiver learn which author/originator to 
> trust?
> 
> In this case Richard distinguished two scenarios:
> 
> a) Tsunami warning
> 
> Here the warning may be provided to the recipient/receiver by some 
> local entity. How does the author/originator know when it receives an 
> alert that can indeed be trusted? It could be sent by anyone. It is 
> not very likely that the author of the message is known.
> 
> For this specific case Richard suggested to build on the work in 
> draft- rosen-ecrit-lost-early-warning-01.txt. The basic idea is that 
> the receiver uses LoST to discovers organizations issuing alerts for 
> specific geographical regions. When an alert is received then the 
> author and/or originator fields are checked against the info 
> previously obtained via LoST.
> 
> b) School closed warning
> 
> Here, the recipient will have a prior relationship with the author 
> (the school). A prior "registration" step is likely going to be required.
> 
> (2) Transitive Trust vs. End-to-End Security
> 
> In order to ensure that the comparison between the identity 
> information can be processed by the recipient/receiver there is a need 
> for cryptographic assurance. During the meeting we had discussed the 
> possibility to use transitive trust (I know my service provider and I 
> assume that he will only accept and forward alerts it got from other 
> trusted sources) and end-to-end security.
> 
> In the area of end-to-end security it was noticed that the deployment 
> reality of SIP (and XMPP) with regard to e2e security is rather weak.
> Security at the alert level was seen as OK but XMLDSIG was not 
> acceptable.
> 
> I hope my writeup makes sense (even though I am tired already).
> 
> Ciao
> Hannes
> 
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