+1 to the original post and Paul's.

Putting per user data in the DNS is a lousy approach, it has never been a
succes because the DNS administrators are typically network admins and they
are a separate class to DNS admins.

A better approach would be to use WebFinger/XKMS/LDAP/TBS to serve up an EE
cert for the end user and to use DANE to establish a trust anchor under
which the EE cert is issued.


The amount of email that is protected by message layer security is a
negligible fraction of that protected by STARTTLS. One of the main reasons
for that is that the per client user model is fundamentally broken.



On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 5:03 PM, Paul Hoffman <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Apr 19, 2013, at 1:29 PM, Richard Barnes <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > Just a thought: It might be simpler to do S/MIME certificate discovery
> using WebFinger than using DANE.  You would just have to do an HTTPS query
> to a URI of the  form...
> >
> > <
> https://example.com/.well-known/webfinger?resource=mailto:[email protected]&rel=certificate
> >
> >
> > ... then parse a JSON object to find the certificate.  As opposed to
> having an appropriately upgraded DNS library, being able to do DNSSEC, and
> parsing the binary record format.
>
> That might be a good way to do certificate discovery, but not really a
> good way to have a second trust anchor if one wanted to get away from the
> distributed PKIX hierarchies.
>
> There are plenty of ways to do certificate discovery. The question is how
> to be sure that the certificate you get is one you want to use.
>
> > This process could still benefit from DANE, via TLSA validation on the
> HTTPS connection.  And basically the only documentation you would need
> would be to define the "certificate" relation type.
>
> Um, doesn't that wipe out the supposed advantages you list above?
>
> --Paul Hoffman
> _______________________________________________
> dane mailing list
> [email protected]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dane
>



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