Nelson B wrote: ...
The user who receives the cert presentation relies as much on the accuracy of the cert revocation information after the issuance as on the accuracy of the information placed in the cert itself.
Hence both aspects of CA operation (pre and post issuance) are worthy criteria for CA selection, IMO.
Nelson,
you are asking CAs to do all this work and cover all these risks, but, have you shown that the risks are worth covering?
I.e., how frequent are they? Has anyone ever lost any money because of a failure in the revocation process?
If this were a real-world problem, and losses could be shown, we'd be able to say something like "as the probability of loss is 1% and the likely loss is $1000, it makes some sort of sense to spend up to $10 on an insurance policy."
As the CAs are going to spend money on this (as they are "forced to" by selection criteria) and as that money then gets extracted from the purchasers of CA-signed certs, it behoves to show that the money is well spent.
For example, imagine that total losses for revocation failures were $10,000 in any one year. But, fixing those losses cost $10 per cert. As there are some 41,450 signed cert years every year, that means that the user base has to pay $414,500 to cover $10,000 in losses.
That's not a good deal. I would say that if that was the best that could be done, then revocation losses should *not* be fixed in the protocols and in the CA mix.
Hence, how likely is all this and how much has been lost? Is the situation bad enough such that it is worthwhile to beat up on the CAs and get them to lift their game?
Crypto protocols are great things because they can reduce and sometimes eliminate risks without cost. But, the moment, we step outside the assumption of no cost, and ask others to do stuff, at their cost, we have to be very careful not to create an edifice that loses more money than it saves.
iang
PS: http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/sdata/200401/certca.html _______________________________________________ mozilla-crypto mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/mozilla-crypto
