Re: [Endymail] Another view of the problem and what the IETF could do

[Leo Vegoda <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Sep 02, 2014 at 05:22:16PM +0100, Stephen Farrell wrote:
> 
> I'm not quite sure I'm reading this correctly, but just in
> case...
> 
> On 02/09/14 17:02, Leo Vegoda wrote:
> > Handing out cryptographic identity certificates or similar to people
> > who do not understand the risks or benefits and do not have a
> > suitable key management framework doesn't seem a great idea to me.
> 
> If this list concludes that an Internet-scale key management
> framework is required where all key holders are strongly
> authenticated before they get any functional benefit, then
> that makes life easy - we have 20+ years of evidence that
> there's no point in bothering to try construct that;-)

That's not quite what I meant. What I meant is that if there is an
authority handing out certificates then it should do so in a
responsible way. Cryptographic certificates are sufficiently
different from photographic identity documents that pre-existing
assumptions need to be changed to avoid disappointment.

This does not need to be hierarchical but it does need some
infrastructure support and either some really outstandingly good
user interface design or education. If users receive encrypted
e-mail and then loose the corresponding private key then they loose
the ability to read old messages. People working for organizations
handing out X.509 certificates for S/MIME use get training and their
keys might well be escrowed. But ordinary individuals are unlikely
to get training and they do expect to be able to read old e-mails. 

I think this is the sort of basic usability issue that requires some
kind of user friendly key management. Whether it needs to be
Internet-scale - well I don't know - but it needs to be good enough
that the key is reasonably secure if a laptop or tablet is lost or
stolen. 

I expect that in most cases strong authentication is not required
but people will need some kind of mechanism for evaluating how much
trust to assign a new key they have not seen before and that will
also require some kind of education or another superb user
interface. Most people will be new to cryptography and will need
some help.

Leo