On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 7:08 PM, Daniel Veditz <dved...@mozilla.com> wrote: > On 4/15/2014 7:43 AM, nobody wrote: >> >> I just wondered... what is the pull back regarding Convergence to put it >> in >> the webbrowsers by default?
Well one very big problem was that Peter was not prepared to do the work of engaging in the standards area himself. Which is an almost certain way to ensure that a proposal isn't going to thrive. Another problem that most PKI alternatives suffer from is the 'hydrogen car' mentality. According to a popular Internet meme the reason that we aren't driving hydrogen cars RIGHT NOW is that the evil Detroit car companies are desperate to kill it at any cost. Now imagine that you are a startup trying to build a hydrogen car, would that be a productive mindset to base business assumptions on? I think it is pretty clear that approaching the problem of building a hydrogen car from the point of view that all advice from GM and Ford was ill-intentioned attempts at sabotage would cut the startup off from essential knowledge. So Peter's approach of beginning his proposal with a canard against existing CAs and refusing to correct the public impression he gave was not a good start. The DNSSEC crowd suffer from this as well. I keep telling them that until they start signing the root with something more secure than RSA1024 then all they are doing is an extended science project. Unfortunately the only way I can get them to change is to raise this issue at senior US policy levels which has the unfortunate side effect of reinforcing the (entirely justified) belief that ICANN is just a US govt. proxy. > The main issue is who are the notaries? If they're simply reflecting back > "Yup, I see this valid CA cert" then they aren't adding a whole lot of value > for the amount of risk they introduce, and if they're making their own > judgement about the validity of the certificates on some other ground they > just become a type of Certificate Authority themselves. Who pays for that > infrastructure, and what is their motive? And that leads to the second problem of how reliable is that notary infrastructure going to be. > Firefox and Chrome are both working on implementing "key pinning" (and > participating in the standardization process for it) which won't "free us > from the CA system" but will at least ameliorate one of the worst aspects > which is that any two-bit CA anywhere in the world can issue a certificate > for any site, anywhere. And don't forget that we should deploy CAA as part of that solution. I am also working on ways of bringing the key pinning information into the DNS space so that we can get a 'secure on first use'. That is the reason I am interested in DNS Encryption. It is a change to the DNS ecosystem which will break the ludicrous practice of taking DNS service from the resolver advertised in DHCP. Which opens up the opportunity for ditching a bunch of legacy DNS stupid (500 byte message limit for instance). > The IETF is working on standardizing "Certificate Transparency", Chrome is > implementing it, and at least one CA is participating. This again doesn't > free us from the CA system, but it does make the public certificates > auditable so that mis-issuance could theoretically be detected. There is certainly a lot of functional overlap. I think that CT has pretty much addressed the major use case used to justify Convergence. But it does not meet the real goal of Convergence -- Website: http://hallambaker.com/ _______________________________________________ dev-security-policy mailing list dev-security-policy@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-security-policy
