Ian G <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > As an observation, what's happening on the > litigation front suggests that the scene is now set > for this conflict of goals to be tested in court. There > are now 4 separate thrusts in litigation testing the > assumptions of Internet security (two of these are > not public). Which means that patience is > exhausted, and what is presented as security is > no longer taken at face value.
one might also be tempted to make a case that in a situation where their are two parties with ongoing relationship and there are well established infrastructures for managing that relationship (in some cases involving methodologies that have evolved over hundreds of years) ... that and that the introduction of any external operations interferring in management of that relationship ... like a TTP CA .. is detrimental to the efficient business operation. there is a case made that the exploding use of electronic, online access has created a severe strain on the shared-secret authentication paradigm ... people having to memorize scores of unique pin/passwords. http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#secrets asynmmetric cryptography created a business solution opportunity. In the shared-secret paradigm the same datdum is used to both originate as well as authenticate. Persons having access or gaining access to the authentication information also have the information to fraudulent impersonate and originate. The business solution applied to asymmetric cryptography was to designate one of the paired-keys as "public" and freely available for authentication purposes. The business process then defines the other of the paired-keys as "private" and is to be kept confidential and never divulged. The business process defines only the private key (which can never be divulged) can be used to originate a digital signature ... and only the public key is used to verify the digitial signature. from the 3-factor authentication paradigm * something you have * something you know * something you are the validation of a digital signature with a specific public key implies "something you have" authentication ... i.e. the originator has access and use of the corresponding private key (which has always been kept confidential and has never been divulged). Attacks on authentication material files involving public key authentication doesn't open the avenue of impersonation. Therefor registering public keys as authentication material in existing relationship administrative and management infrastructures acts as a countermeasure to individuals compromising those files and being able to used the information for impersonation and fraud. The business role of CAs and certificates ,,, especially TTP CAs, is to provide information for relying parties in situations involving first time contact between strangers where the relying party has no recourse to any resources for determining information about the originator. In situations where two parties have established, on going relationship and there are well established facilities for administuring and managing that relationship that the statle, static offline paradigm certificates are redundant and superfluous. It is possible that the significant paradigm mismatch between well established relationship adminstrative and management infrastructures and CA TTPs (targeted at addressing the problem of first time communication between two strangers) is responsible for at least some of the discord. -- Anne & Lynn Wheeler | http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ _______________________________________________ mozilla-crypto mailing list [email protected] http://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/mozilla-crypto
