Re: [secdir] [saag] Interest in draft-dong-savi-cga-header-03.txt; possibility of a five minute slot at saag?

On 07/29/2010 10:28 AM, Richard L. Barnes wrote:
> The thing I'm struggling with here is what value a CGA provides over a 
> bare public key.

My understanding MAY be incomplete, but...

It looks like CGA generation binds the prefix to the key, thus there is 
a trust that the prefix has not been altered.

I don't do that in HIT generation. Don't know if I should change HIT 
generation or not. I would need to look at the IPR around CGAs.

> The use of a CGA as a source address doesn't prove anything except 
> that the entity that generated it had access to a given public key, 
> which is nothing special. If you're going to get any security benefit, 
> you either need
>
> 1. Out-of-band knowledge that SEND was applied in the relevant subnet, or
> 2. Some interaction that proves ownership of the private key
>
> In the second case, you might as well just use existing protocols for 
> proving ownership of a key (IPsec, TLS); the first case is just a 
> special case of the second, where the entity applying access control 
> has a special relationship with the layer-2 network (kind of fragile).
>
> Either way, what you end up doing is validating that the entity holds 
> a given private key, at which point the source address has nothing to 
> do with the security of communications.
>
> tl;dr: CGAs don't have any security benefit without another protocol. 
> What's the use case?
>
> --Richard
>
>
>
>
> On Jul 29, 2010, at 10:14 AM, Sam Hartman wrote:
>
>>>>>>> "Stephen" == Stephen Kent <kent@bbn.com> writes:
>>
>> Stephen> I agree that the primary motivation for CGAs arose in the
>> Stephen> SeND context, and that privacy is an independent
>> Stephen> feature. But, the context in which CGAs were intended to
>> Stephen> provide an ability to establish a binding to an IPv6
>> Stephen> address was local. When one moves beyond this local
>> Stephen> context, and one advocates having more distant nodes
>> Stephen> challenge a host, this creates privacy questions.
>>
>> I think we've been looking at CGAs that have non-local scope for a
>> while. Section 7.4 of RFC 3972 seems to anticipate CGAs used with other
>> protocols. It's my understanding that shim6 supports both HBAs and CGAs
>> for non-local contexts. I also believe the MIP6 context for CGA use is
>> non-local.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> saag mailing list
>> saag@ietf.org
>> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/saag
>
> _______________________________________________
> saag mailing list
> saag@ietf.org
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/saag
>