Re: [woes] Naked Public Key, was: RE: Proposed charter, post-Quebec edition

Joe Hildebrand <joe.hildebrand@webex.com> Sat, 06 August 2011 19:29 UTC

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Date: Sat, 06 Aug 2011 13:30:08 -0400
From: Joe Hildebrand <joe.hildebrand@webex.com>
To: Leif Johansson <leifj@mnt.se>, Eric Rescorla <ekr@rtfm.com>
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Subject: Re: [woes] Naked Public Key, was: RE: Proposed charter, post-Quebec edition
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On 8/6/11 7:43 AM, "Leif Johansson" <leifj@mnt.se> wrote:

> So in that case I still support having the spec explain (very carefully)
> how you do "raw keys" - i.e keys with no intrinsic semantics - and then
> also adding the cryptographers caveat to that.

To be clear, when I was talking about raw keys, I didn't mean keys with no
intrinsic semantics.  I just meant something along the lines of PKCS1; a
modulus, an exponent, some algorithm info, and that's about it (I'd be ok
with defining private keys in the same format as well).  It would have
defined semantic, it just wouldn't be tied to an identity.

A definite goal for me that is NOT met by PKCS1 however, is to *limit* the
choices and extensibility in certain directions to reduce the overall
complexity.

Of course, once you've got primitives for sign and encrypt and you've got a
key format, doing something like PKIX is possible.  Perhaps we could sketch
that out as potential follow-on work in the charter, so we can make progress
on some of the shorter-term stuff first?

-- 
Joe Hildebrand