[pkng] Where to go? What to do?

[Paul Hoffman <[e-mail]>]

Greetings again. This list has not been used to good measure yet, and it is not clear if it will be. This would be a good time to find out.

This RG has a charter that was well-discussed; it is at <http://irtf.org/charter?gtype=rg&group=pkng>. In particular:

The research challenges expected to be faced by the PKNG RG include devising a taxonomy for PKI that is based on maximal utility for a wide variety of users; avoiding features whose genesis derive from the semantics of PKIX rather than the general use cases for public keys; issues of privacy and identification in certificates; and determining how to evaluate differences in transition strategies given that such a transition has never taken place on the Internet. The IRTF is more amenable to this type of research than, say, the IETF, where a single "requirements document" would be expected to be finished in a short period of time and a single protocol would be expected to emerge by group consensus.

This list has had short bursts of interest in what was called "inside-out PKI", namely one that was designed with the user explicitly making all choice of trust anchors and what those anchors could attest to. However, those threads quickly languished. I think this is a ripe area for research, but only if there is interest from at least a handful of folks.

Please speak up soon if you think that there is interesting work in our charter, and hopefully start threads here with such discussions. If we don't have sufficient interest, we can close the list quietly.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium