[saag] The Mathematical Mesh
Phillip Hallam-Baker <phill@hallambaker.com> Mon, 22 April 2019 16:58 UTC
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From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <phill@hallambaker.com>
Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2019 12:58:11 -0400
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Subject: [saag] The Mathematical Mesh
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Five years ago I started to look at the reasons that Internet users do not use end-to-end secure mail despite the fact that almost every email client in use supported S/MIME and OpenPGP had been available for decades. In answering that question, I quickly realized that we were trying to solve the problems we were interested in rather than the ones that the user actually cared about. And yes, users do really care about security but their security concerns are much broader than the ones raised on the cypherpunks mailing lists. They are concerned about the control that corporations might have over them much more than governments. They are concerned with the risk of losing the pictures of their kids at 5 years old to ransomware. Carl Ellison says that the user base of any security protocol halves for each click required to use it. This led me to ask, 'how can we reduce total user effort' and not just effort required for security. Today we ask the user to configure their email client twice, first to make use of email and again to make email secure (and then we require them to redo the second annually for S/MIME). The result of this approach is an infrastructure I call the Mathematical Mesh which I would like IETF participants to consider as a standards track effort, either in part or in whole. The goal of the Mesh is to make computers easier to use by making them more secure. This is easier than people might imagine. The key here is that every set of instructions that you write down and give to a human can be written as code and given to a suitably authorized computer system. The phrase suitably authorized is key here, often the reason manual intervention is required to configure systems requires is that certain system privileges are needed. Like BitCoin, the Mesh extends the traditional cryptographic repertoire. While all of the cryptographic techniques used in the Mesh are well established in the academic field, this is the first time anyone has (to my knowledge) proposed making use of them in an open standard. The Mesh is designed to make full use of the capabilities of modern computer systems: It is assumed that every user has access to a machine with at least the capability of a Raspberry Pi Zero for purposes of configuring an managing devices. Connection and use of constrained devices of Arduino Mega class and above is also supported by offloading certain security functions to a trusted gateway. I am posting this here to solicit opinions as to whether I should bring some or all of this work to the IETF or if I should take it to other forums. The drafts are available in plaintext or HTML format. Since some of the drafts make extensive use of mathematical notations, I recommend reading them in the HTML format. HTML: http://mathmesh.com/Documents/draft-hallambaker-mesh-architecture.html http://mathmesh.com/Documents/draft-hallambaker-mesh-udf.html http://mathmesh.com/Documents/draft-hallambaker-mesh-dare.html http://mathmesh.com/Documents/draft-hallambaker-mesh-schema.html http://mathmesh.com/Documents/draft-hallambaker-mesh-protocol.html http://mathmesh.com/Documents/draft-hallambaker-mesh-trust.html http://mathmesh.com/Documents/draft-hallambaker-mesh-cryptography.html Plaintext: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-hallambaker-mesh-architecture/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-hallambaker-mesh-udf/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-hallambaker-mesh-dare/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-hallambaker-mesh-schema/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-hallambaker-mesh-protocol/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-hallambaker-mesh-trust/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-hallambaker-mesh-cryptography/ These drafts are not yet complete as the example material and schema documentation is still being revised. This will be addressed as the reference code passes the remaining unit tests for each functional unit. The principle adopted being that it is better to have no examples than incorrect ones. The following drafts are planned but not yet written: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-hallambaker-mesh-constrained/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-hallambaker-mesh-quantum/ The reference code is open source and runs in C# under .net Core. It is currently tested only on the Windows platform but previous versions have run on OSX and Linux. https://github.com/hallambaker/Mathematical-Mesh The code system is also open source. These tools allowed me to design, implement and document a code base that is capable of performing significant portions of the functions of PKIX, S/MIME, Blockchain, SMTP, IMAP and TLS on my own in a little less than three years. https://github.com/hallambaker/PHB-Build-Tools
- Re: [saag] The Mathematical Mesh Nico Williams
- [saag] The Mathematical Mesh Phillip Hallam-Baker
- Re: [saag] [Secdispatch] The Mathematical Mesh Richard Barnes
- Re: [saag] [Secdispatch] The Mathematical Mesh Phillip Hallam-Baker
- Re: [saag] The Mathematical Mesh Phillip Hallam-Baker
- Re: [saag] The Mathematical Mesh Nico Williams
- Re: [saag] The Mathematical Mesh Phillip Hallam-Baker
- Re: [saag] The Mathematical Mesh Nico Williams
- Re: [saag] The Mathematical Mesh Nico Williams
- Re: [saag] The Mathematical Mesh Ben Laurie
- Re: [saag] The Mathematical Mesh Phillip Hallam-Baker
- Re: [saag] The Mathematical Mesh Ben Laurie
- Re: [saag] The Mathematical Mesh Phillip Hallam-Baker
- Re: [saag] The Mathematical Mesh Ben Laurie
- Re: [saag] The Mathematical Mesh Nico Williams
- Re: [saag] The Mathematical Mesh Phillip Hallam-Baker
- Re: [saag] The Mathematical Mesh Ben Laurie
- Re: [saag] The Mathematical Mesh Ben Laurie
- Re: [saag] The Mathematical Mesh Phillip Hallam-Baker
- Re: [saag] The Mathematical Mesh Nico Williams
- Re: [saag] The Mathematical Mesh Phillip Hallam-Baker
- Re: [saag] The Mathematical Mesh Nico Williams
- Re: [saag] The Mathematical Mesh Phillip Hallam-Baker