Re: [therightkey] Basically, it's about keeping the CAs honest

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor <[e-mail]>]

On 02/16/2012 01:41 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 1:17 PM, Daniel Kahn Gillmor <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> The main argument seems to be "people need to do this for legal reasons"
>> -- well, ok, let's have someone with a legal requirement for
>> eavesdropping/monitoring step forward and propose an external,
>> session-key-sharing mechanism that is *separate* from TLS.  Then IT
>> staff can deploy such a system on the clients they're required to monitor.
> 
> And how does that work?
> 
> Saying that 'it should be separate' does not absolve you from
> proposing how it would work. If you are putting a proposal on the
> table then it needs to be either 'don't do it at all' or 'this is how
> to do it', I can't see how 'let someone else do it' helps us.

I'm not about to spend my own time writing this up, since i agree with
you that doing an MITM is a bad idea in general.  But the concept of
sharing the session keys of a TLS connection with a third party so they
can listen in isn't some genius feat of invention, and someone
sufficiently motivated to do so could write up such a spec.

But that's not to say that it's in-scope for discussion on this list.

We could also discuss ways that TLS hurts the environment by being
overly wasteful of CPU cycles (and how to improve things there).  That
might also be an interesting discussion, but it isn't germane to finding
"the right key", so it doesn't belong on this list.

Regards,

	--dkg