Re: [saag] post-X509 cryptographic identities

[Tony Rutkowski <[e-mail]>]

Hi Stephen,

Given the state of affairs today, the folks involved here as well as the 
IETF Trust are unlikely to avoid lawyering up.  You might also get the 
Trust to "insurance up" for you, and provide better guidance on high 
risk activities.  The previous treatment of the subject is now a bit old 
and was inclusive. https://www.ietf.org/jabber/logs/antitrust/  It also 
didn't treat other problem areas like tort liability.

This is also all assuming that there is no direct engagement from 
government authorities as they once did - which might actually be a good 
thing from an lawyering up and insurancing up standpoint. They assume 
the responsibility and provide the cover - which is what occurs in ITU-T 
X.509 activities.

-t


On 2020-02-11 4:05 PM, Stephen Farrell wrote:
> Hiya,
>
> As a quote of mine seems to have started this...
>
> On 11/02/2020 10:55, Michael Richardson wrote:
>> Stephen Farrell <[e-mail]> wrote in a IETF-last call thread:
>>      > Anyway overall I take this as more evidence that
>>      > x.509-based pki has outlived it's useful lifetime.
>>      > Given the webpki needs CT (which it totally does)
>>      > and now maybe novel revocation mechanisms like this,
>>      > (as well as soon-to-be PQ schemes if we believe
>>      > what people tell us), I'd argue it may well be time
>>      > to try see if there's any consensus on a post-x.509
>>      > direction towards which to head.
>>
>> I agree with you strongly.
> Great.
>
> Unfortunately for me, I figure I disagree with the
> direction of almost all the discussion in the rest
> of this thread so far;-)
>
> - I like DNSSEC, but at ~1% penetration in 20 years
> it is not the answer, regardless of whether or not
> it ought be the answer. (Even so, continued effort
> to improve DNSSEC deployment by paying registrars
> etc is good as it does mitigate real vulnerabilities
> when deployed.)
> - I like some of PHB's ideas wrt his meshy thing,
> but I do not believe that a single all-encompassing
> model like that that starts from better crypto will
> fit all needs. I'd be happy to be wrong, but also
> surprised.
> - I like abstract discussions sometimes, but IIRC
> I think I've seen those more abstract points made
> various times over the years with them leading to
> nothing much.
> - While I probably got fed up with x.509 about the
> turn of the century after a decade of writing code
> for it, I recall that even before then I concluded
> it had been a pretty bad error to lawyer-up any of
> those discussions before we knew how to schlep the
> bits around, so I'd run a mile if someone wanted
> to start from there;-)
>
> For me, I'd be interested in starting with a much
> less ambitious goal, e.g. perhaps how to integrate
> PQ algs into TLS and SSH without x.509, or maybe
> whether we could do even better than ESNI inside
> HTTPSSVC, or maybe if there's a way to unify smime
> and pgp via new key packaging (that MUA folks would
> accept). Or other relatively modest but still quite
> hard things like those.
>
> If some set of similar designs addressing a few
> such concrete problems could be deployable alongside
> the current stuff, and people started coding 'em up,
> then we might be on to something.
>
> Cheers,
> S.
>
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