Subject: [Ietf-hub-boston] Proposal for a local meetup

From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2016 14:07:15 -0400

I am going to be in BA for IETF '95. But after I come back, I have a
project that I have been working on that I would like to share with
likeminded IETF types. Perhaps we could use hubs to meet up under
'Note Well' terms?

What I really find missing at IETF meetings is whiteboard time. The
most productive use of having a group of engineers at the early part
of a project is to brainstorm. Perhaps we could meetup to discuss this
and other things folk are working on.

The project I am working on is The Mathematical Mesh. The Internet
Drafts, videos of demonstrations and links to the code repos (MIT
license) can be found here:

http://prismproof.org/
(or http://cryptomesh.org/)

The original goal was to make secure applications as easy to use as
regular apps. But over the course of the work we realized that wasn't
enough. So the new goal was to make using computers easier. The
demonstrations prove this is entirely possible.

The biggest hassle in getting a new machine is to configure it with
all my accounts, network configs, etc. Of course there are proprietary
ways to do this if all your gear is from one vendor but these haven't
really worked very well for me at all. Every one of my Apple devices
is complaining about not having some connection to one of the many
different services they use for this.

The other problem with the proprietary services is that they are
vulnerable to a warrant attack.

What the Mesh does is to provide a personal PKI with the user as their
own ultimate root of trust.  The user can connect devices and
applications to their root of trust. Once connected, a device
automatically has access to all the config information they need for
all the apps for which they are authorized.

And while it is transferring my SMTP account parameters, the Mesh is
also populating the S/MIME and OpenPGP keys for the apps without any
user intervention. And because the process is automatic, it is now
trivial to do things such as automatically change the encryption key
when a device is lost and to use different signature keys per device.

This should be useful to both the power user and the unsophisticated
user alike. I have lots of servers running SSH (12). I need to be able
to access them from any of my machines with keyboards (6). So I have
(12+6)*6 = 108 bilateral key relationships to manage. That is too many
to expect to manage accurately without a tool. Yes everyone has a
script. Is your script actually secure? How confident are you that it
is?

The code is in C# which will run on Windows. Mac and Linux. Right now
however the UI is Windows only. I am working on porting that as the
current priority.

---

From: Ted Lemon <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2016 15:53:14 -0400

This is a topic in which I too am interested.   Let's do it!

On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 2:07 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]
> wrote:

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