Subject: RE: SCVP-01

From: Paul Hoffman / VPNC <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 09:38:47 -0700

At 01:00 PM 8/24/1999 -0700, Don Schmidt (Exchange) wrote:
>But most important, we do not agree with the fundamental justification for
>SCVP.  The primary rationale provided in Oslo was that server-based
>certificate validation is required by small devices which do NOT have
>adequate processing and memory capabilities to locally validate certificate
>chains, but DO have readily available network connections to offload this
>work to a server.

As the -01 draft says very plainly, there are two broad uses for SCVP; you 
have named just one. The other, helping clients do their own validation, 
was heavily discussed in Oslo and made much more prominent throughout the 
-01 draft.

You may be right that no small Internet appliance will ever need a host to 
do its validation (although I question how any of us can predict the future 
desires and needs of Internet devices very well, given our abysmal past 
predictions). You will certainly be right if there is no standard way for 
these products to get the services they would need if they existed.

However, I'm quite skeptical of anyone who feels that a PKI user can always 
easily get all the needed chaining certificates and revocation information 
for path validation for all the partners whom they would want to 
authenticate. This will only work in a closed environment, probably with 
one root and path lengths of no more than 2 CAs, and clients that can use 
multiple retrieval protocols. Restricting PKI customers to this model 
doesn't serve their legitimate needs at all.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium