Subject: learning from history (was: Re: rfc2440bis-02 comments)

From: Dave Del Torto <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 7 Jan 2001 15:29:38 -0800

At 5:53 pm +0900 2000-12-28, [email-masked] wrote:
>...  the points i wish to make are:
>
>   -expiring keys from keyservers is not necessarily a bad idea -- at least
>    your example does not convince me that we would be significantly worse
>    off than the current situation.

Keys are dime-a-dozen: expiring them is economical. People, OTOH,
are valuable, so it's better to expire the keys, but not the people.

>                                    i like Dave Del Torto's statement:
>      Storing your key on a public keyserver is a privilege, not a right.
>      If you can't do the most basic things to maintain it, you're not
>      doing anyone any good, least of all yourself if you want people to
>      use it.

You must also be EMPOWERED to do basic key maintenance on your public 
key. The people who might want to use your key may not not always be 
friendlies. Spammers are only the tip, albeit a sharply annoying one, 
of the iceberg. There are more dangerous threads being woven.

What we're really discussing is the building of standards that users 
will control or standards which will help control them. Keys are good 
for authentication, and can even protect identity (if the anonymix 
allows). But the uncontrolled, irresponsible use of powerful tools 
like the PGP trust model also makes keys great for traffic analysis 
and collecting rosters of cryptographically-bound dissidents. The 
structures are in place to collect names: are you implementing 
technology that makes that scale better?

Until we build ourselves total control over our keys' public 
attributes and visibility, we're not really being empowered by our 
crypto (possibly the opposite). It's hard to get the average user to 
unlearn things. Given the current key formats and the way keyservers 
work, not building full user control over all attributes of their own 
keys on servers amounts to a very bad habit to get the crypto user 
community into.

Let's keep in mind that we've been asked at a recent IETF plenary 
whether or not the IETF should support wiretapping technologies in 
standards. Those kinds of trial balloons are only the first at the 
nexus of human rights and security technology. Technologists have the 
opportunity now --not later-- to establish a positive direction with 
standards and implementations or hand the rudder over to corporations 
and politicians. Ignore this, and these one-way functions are going 
to double back and bite us on the *ss. If Oppenheimer or Einstein 
were alive today, they'd agree that we should luxuriate in this 
discussion now and improve the infrastructure ASAP.

Ask yourself why no major implementor has jumped on the Stealth 
bandwagon in the last 6+ years? Is the fact that RFC2440's 
speculative keyids remain unimplemented an indication of complacency 
in the crypto community?

Who's holding us back?

    dave

__________________________________________________________________________
"The average age of the world's greatest democratic nations has been 200
  years ... from bondage to spiritual faith, from faith to great courage,
  from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to
  complacency, from complacency to selfishness, from selfishness to apathy,
  from apathy to dependency, and from dependency back again into bondage."
	-- Lord Macaulay (1857)

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 8 Jan 2001 08:53:45 -0800

Dave Del Torto, <[email-masked]>, writes:
> will control or standards which will help control them.
> [...]
> crypto (possibly the opposite).

Isn't "total control over... public attributes" something of a
contradiction?  By their nature, public attributes are out in public,
out in the world.  There is no way the owner can exercise "total control"
over them.  Adding features which ostensibly provide this kind of control
could mislead users about what they are accomplishing.

At best we can try to get the key servers to agree on ways of handling
these requests.  But in effect we then bring the multitude of key servers
inside the trust boundary and depend on their cooperation in order to
achieve our trust goals.  This enlarges the trusted computing base and
ultimately weakens security.

> nexus of human rights and security technology.

At the same time we should be cognizant of what is and is not possible.
Giving people the ability to ask key servers to remove their keys will
not achieve the goal of removing those keys from the world's knowledge.

Hal