On 5 December 2012 23:15, Patrick Baxter pa...@cs.ucsb.edu wrote:
On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 5:29 AM, Melvin Carvalho
melvincarva...@gmail.com wrote:
Not sure I've grokked everything in this thread, but some thoughts.
I'm working on the TL;DR version :).
Tying a key to a 'domain' (aka URI) is something that can be done already
using linked data.
I do so on my home page already:
http://melvincarvalho.com/
This contains my GPG key, fingerprint, hex_id, modulus and exponent.
Here is the data view of the same page:
http://graphite.ecs.soton.ac.uk/browser/?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fmelvincarvalho.com%2F
I'm not sure I understand what it is that ties your key to the domain.
So, for example, you know your public key and it that it is the proper
public key for your website. However, from an outsider's perspective,
anyone could publish a signature and claim ownership of your domain.
If they control the network path to a user first looking at your
webpage, then there is no consensus on which public key will get you
MITM'd and which is your actual key if they choose to present a
different one. You add strength by making it available on your
website, but it only goes so far.
The domain is tied to the information via DNS, which is the main web
paradigm. Semantic tags let you make assertions in machine readable form.
Yes, in theory I could add an SSL cert to my homepage, though I havent paid
for one yes.
There's a theoretical attack from MITM, but this is the case for much of
the web.
I'm working on something that can provide extra strength by recording your
public keys over time:
http://publickey.info/
But I havent really had time to maintain it yet.
My general idea is somewhat encompassing of the Sovereign Keys idea,
but thats just part of the solution. Generally, I'd argue, you want a
keysever infrastructure similar to the EFF's soverign keys that
establish's a known single mapping. It widely distributes the public
keys to that keyserver with software so that you have a secure
connection into that data from the start. Now, you have to balance the
needs of updating this mapping with the security of the
infrastructure. There is lots of ways to capture meaningful data on
validity and I'm for using as many ways as possible such that it still
makes sense. Also, keeping a database of personally validated keys is
still massively useful for things like email, phone, and chat. It can
be used in conjunction with a better key server infrastructure to
minimize the trust you place on it.
I need to read up on sovereign keys a bit more. Has there been any serious
critiques of it yet?
You could probably also argue that the less authority a key-server
infrastructure has, the more resistant it is to corruption. This lends
strength to trying to not entirely relying on it even if it is
distributed and replicated.
Now, the idea is that with this infrastructure you are restricted to
how you learn about new keys. So an active attacker on your network
connection will not find it so trivial present an fake key to users
that are connecting for the first time.
Scroll down to see the PKI fields.
I can use this key to sign and encrypt mail, for s/MIME as an x.509
certificate, to login via ssh and also encrypted chat on retroshare
I also have links to other people storing keys in a kind of web of trust.
What you call the WOT is really a Graph of Trust (GOT) or Network of
Trust
(NOT) in so far as the Web is normally loosely associated with HTTP.
Maybe, I'm confusing the issue by trying to tie too many things
together, but the I think the problems all have a lot of fundamental
things in common.
Also, If a user can link to you through a WOT, then they have that
initial validity that creates a much strong authentication and don't
have to trust the first key servered over the network. I think there
is a ton more potential for more effectively using WOT paths to
establish validity as well.
Yes, trust should be additive, rather than one WOT to rule them all.
There's no perfect trust system, but you can do things to increase the
confidence interval. You can generate a lot of functionality with limited
trust too. The thing I dont like is when trust creates a barrier to entry
that does NOT allow you to do things. Users should have freedom to choose,
imho.
I think in terms of accessibility and usability we need a GPG equivalent
of
what hotmail did to email. This is what we call webizing. Then
people
can make relations, sign and encrypt, over the web just as easily as
they do
with desktop clients. Obviously a huge task and the crypto in the
browser
group will help.
Definitely a massive undertaking and I think the most relevant problem
to the world of crypto. It is getting better and more transparent (OTR
ect.) and I think one of the last difficult tasks is making it easy
for users with little knowledge to not only use
