Re: [Syslog] transport-tls vs. syslog-sign

> [Rainer] Hi all,
> 
> I did a cross-check today between the two drafts. Both require
> certificates. Syslog-sign actually includes distribution policies in
> section 5. There is a huge difference between the ways certificates are
> handled in both drafts.
> 
> Implementing both will at least require duplicate/different code for
> like tasks. Same goes for the administration. I have not yet a solution
> proposal, but I would like to make the WG aware of this fact.
> 
> What are your thoughts?
> 

[RJHorn]

To some degree you are describing the present state of implementation for 
certificate and key management.  It's a mess.

I expect that in the end this will generalize into:

 - For each different application purpose (browsing, signing, prescribing, 
logging, payments, ...) there will be stores for
   - Private key information (used locally to sign, etc.)
   - Trusted individual certificates (e.g., self-signed but not restricted 
to self-signed)
   - Trusted signing certificates
   - Anchors of Trust

With luck there will emerge common maintenance methods, but they sure 
aren't there now.  For each browser I've got a different maintenance 
method for trusted signers, trusted individual certificates, and private 
key information.  I don't have any browsers that actually manage usig an 
anchor of trust.  And that is for the single application purpose of 
browsing.  The browsers are all different.

The nature and meanings of trust is dependent on the application purpose, 
so you should not have a single single store.  We will always need a way 
to have different stores for different purposes. Meanwhile, we struggle 
with every implementation having different maintenance methods.  At least 
they agree on the PKCS format for exchanging these elements.  I don't see 
syslog as the proper venue for doing more than defining use cases for 
this.  Longer term, I hope that a common agreement emerges on how to name 
and organize these stores so that common maintenance can be implemented.

For the specifics of sign vs transport, is there an application difference 
between being an authenticated sender of messages, and being an 
authenticated signer of messages?  I think that there is, so they do need 
to be separate stores.  I haven't looked at the details of functionality 
required by sign because I haven't had any real uses yet for signing the 
messages.  The differences should be reducable to using different stores 
for key and certificate information, and performing different operations 
(e.g., signing) on the messages.

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