Michael, It seems that you don't believe much in technical solutions as enablers. As a technologist I have a bit hard to cope with that :-)
Let me take a practical example. In the EU most on-line banks use two-factor authentication. The majority of these use OTP (One Time Password) solutions that definitely not are without cost as well as susceptible to phishing. In addition OTP is not terribly convenient for users but that is (of course) something the banks care a little bit less about. So why don't they use PKI instead? Some people say it is because PKI is difficult and introduces legal and liability hurdles. IMNSHO this is total BS since a bank-local PKI isn't designed to work outside of the bank's domain. PKI in such a setup is just another kind of password. So what is then real problem? 1. The European Smart Card industry who do not want to become suppliers of commodities. Of course the latter is a REQUIREMENT for general deployment 2. Governments who believe that ID-cards and eID are natural combos in spite of the fact that USB and USB memory sticks are everywhere, while the traditional smart card interface is not. 3. Governments claiming that the use-case for physical IDs and eIDs are essentially the same 4. Governments that do not understand that their eID concept does not address more than a tiny fraction of their citizens' needs for authentication on the Internet 5. Governments investing in stuff like CEN 15480 and ISO/IEC 24727 6. Governments pushing bizarre Bridge CA concepts PKI for consumers will become bigger than OTP when PKI is housed in mobile phones although initially OTP will be used in mobile phones rather than by special-purpose devices. To achieve that we need a whole bunch of enablement technologies. Most of the PKIX enrollment stuff will be obsolete in 5-10 years from now because it doesn't meet the requirements imposed by the "Open Key Container" paradigm which I and A LOT OF OTHER PEOPLE actually work with. No, the SIM is not the target because it is closed key-container with limited capacity. The Open Key Container is a part of the CPU. It is already shipping in huge quantities, it is "just" not properly enabled. The problems with mobile phone security issues are exaggerated and are also in no way cast in concrete. If the requirement is "perfect" security, we have to accept that nothing will happen. If we OTOH accept the notion that security is rather a "journey" we may indeed do some progress. Google's Android as well as Symbian 9.3 are not comparable to Windows which indeed has a broken security model. I don't expect a reply on this because it will anyway take some five years or so to figure out if the above is correct or not. Anders ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Ströder" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Newsgroups: mozilla.dev.tech.crypto To: <dev-tech-crypto@lists.mozilla.org> Sent: Wednesday, November 26, 2008 18:18 Subject: Re: Creating a Global User-level CA/Trust Infrastructure forSecureMessaging Anders Rundgren wrote: > Ian G wrote: > >>> => Encrypting/signing must be made a business requirement in contracts. >>> That's the whole point. And there's no technical solution for it. > >> That's as close to a perfect dilemma as I've come across! It's not a >> business requirement, so we must make it a business requirement ... > > Another alternative is to Anders, still you fail to see the real problems since you propose technical solutions for non-technical issues. But let's see: > 1. abandon non-scalable trust infrastructures such as the one required by > S/MIME Why "non-scalable"? Can you be more verbose? > 2. abandon schmes that use explicit encryption keys like S/MIME Are you aware of the requirements for separate encryption keys? Some companies have the legal requirements for key escrow in litigation cases. That's the main reason why encryption and signature keys are separated. > 3. introduce secure mobile secure key-storage Ah, yeah. Did you ever think of a growing key history and such? > 4. put the latter in cell phones Even cell phones can break. And I don't consider them to be trustworthy key stores 1. with all the control the cell phone provider has over them, 2. all the gadgets installed with security issues, 3. with the limited data storage size on today's SIM cards. And the main point: You fail to explain how trust is to be established. Ciao, Michael. _______________________________________________ dev-tech-crypto mailing list dev-tech-crypto@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-tech-crypto
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