Re: the introduction problem, was Email and reputation (was Re: Service outages planned for April 25)

[Christian Huitema <[e-mail]>]

On 5/2/2022 9:24 PM, Keith Moore wrote:
> On 5/2/22 09:20, John R Levine wrote:
>
>> We have several decades of S/MIME and PGP failing because nobody 
>> knows how to do key distribution at scale.
>
> ...
>
> User interface issues seem like some of the more significant problems 
> because (for example) it really does make sense for the President's 
> secretary to sign an email from the President.  How do you communicate 
> to users who has the authority to sign something for purpose A but not 
> purpose B?  And yet, humans have been doing similar things with 
> signatures on paper for many centuries.   I don't think it's an 
> unsolvable problem unless perhaps you want to cram all of that 
> information on a watch face.
...
> So I see a lot of careful engineering that's needed, and a lot of user 
> interface work (which is admittedly problematic for IETF), and 
> probably some hard political work by honest people to overcome the 
> efforts of dishonest people who will try to subvert it (whether or not 
> they believe they're doing good).
>
> But I don't think there are fundamentally unsolvable technical 
> problems, so much as problems that make people uncomfortable - because 
> there's no simple system that spans a wide enough range of compromises 
> to suit everyone.   But that doesn't mean that there's no system that 
> doesn't solve most people's problems.


There are many technical problems, but there also some pretty 
fundamental User Interaction issues. The way I think of this problem is 
"I want to find the electronic address of the person whom I call Alice 
Example". That kind of name is not unique in general, but it is unique 
enough for me -- cryptographers often refer to this as a "pet name". 
Doing that in a centralized service is hard. You have to assume that a 
variety of phishers are going to try insert their own set of metadata in 
the service database. I might have better chances asking my friends, who 
may well understand who I refer to as "Alice Example". And maybe we 
could develop some kind of friend-to-friend service overlaid over a 
social network. But if we are not careful, it will be easy to leave 
enough holes to let a whole raft of phishermen through...

-- Christian Huitema