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[Settle] Re: Referee proposal

Phillip Hallam-Baker <phill@hallambaker.com> Wed, 09 July 2025 19:29 UTC

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From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <phill@hallambaker.com>
Date: Wed, 09 Jul 2025 15:29:45 -0400
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To: Eric Rescorla <ekr@rtfm.com>
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Subject: [Settle] Re: Referee proposal
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On Sun, Jul 6, 2025 at 3:09 PM Eric Rescorla <ekr@rtfm.com> wrote:

> I've reviewed this draft and I'm less sanguine about it.
>
> First, the discovery of the referee is a reduction to a previously
> unsolved problem, which is whether you ought to trust some random
> device on the network that responds to a network request. Section 7
> says that this decision is "out of scope of this document" but this is
> the central problem.
>

Agreed. But I see this as driving a constraint. The user needs to make some
form of 'affirmative interaction' to authorize the device onto their
network. For example:

* User scans a QR code on the device.
* User interacts with the device via Bluetooth or NFC.
* Purchaser is given code by vendor that is passed to the network
management system to authorize it.
* Unauthenticated devices are automatically segregated on a 'quarantine'
network until they are authorized.

This is the authorization side of the authentication problem. There is not
going to be one approach meets every use case but we can cover most of them
with a combination.

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