Re: [therightkey] Draft charter for a Transparency Working Group

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

IRTF or IETF?

Do we build on existing legacy proposals or write new stuff?

I think there are two separate or at least separable pieces of
infrastructure needed. One is a transparent timestamp notary infrastructure
and the other is transparency mechanisms that make use of said notary
infrastructure.

The need to revisit the first comes from the expiry of the Harber &
Stornetta patents. I think we should have such a facility as a general Web
facility. We can build an infrastructure that prevents defection without
collusion by every notary and archive using existing technology.


Applying the mechanisms to TLS might be done at different levels with
different deployment impacts. Deploying in EE certs is much harder than
deploying in cert signing certs. But the latter would provide most of the
benefit by blocking MITM certs.

I am looking at SMTP and the approach is very obviously research at this
point.