Re: [Secdispatch] The Mathematical Mesh

[Richard Barnes <[e-mail]>]

Hi Phil,

Thanks for the note.  The IETF typically works on specifications for
interoperability between multiple implementations.  Is there more than one
party involved / interested in implementing?

--Richard

On Mon, Apr 22, 2019 at 12:58 PM Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>
wrote:

> 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-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-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
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