Subject: 2003 PKI Research Workshop CFP

From: Carl Ellison <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2002 09:46:54 -0700

The Internet2 PKI Research activity is based on the premise that a
great deal of research is needed in PK-authenticated authorization
and control systems and that research is not going to come out of
current efforts among PKI vendors and standards bodies, active though
they may be.

The PKI Research Workshop is a place for serious researchers in this
field to present and publish their work.

The 2003 workshop CFP is online at

http://middleware.internet2.edu/pki03/

Last year's workshop program, papers and presentations are available
at

http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~pki02/

if you want to see the kind of papers we are looking for.

 - Carl

+------------------------------------------------------------------+
|Carl M. Ellison         [email-masked]     http://world.std.com/~cme |
|    PGP: 75C5 1814 C3E3 AAA7 3F31  47B9 73F1 7E3C 96E7 2B71       |
+---Officer, arrest that man. He's whistling a copyrighted song.---+

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From: "Anders Rundgren" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2002 12:16:48 +0200

>current efforts among PKI vendors and standards bodies, active though

Carl,
I could not agree more.   Although my perception is that many of
the problems can be concluded as follows.  At least if we are
talking e-commerce:

- The competence of implementers of e-business systems with
   respect to PKI is very low.

- The certificates issued by most CAs do not fit the needs
   of e-business[*].

- The close to religious belief that paper-signatures and
   e-signatures have to be identical in order to create a
   trustworthy PKI-enabled e-world.  As someone else
   recently noted in this list, a paper-signature is technically
   as different to a digital signature as "analog" is to "digital". 

*] So what is the #1 problem with current certificates?
Well,  business systems are "dumb" and cannot understand that
"CN=Jane Doe, O=ACME, C=US" and 
"CN=John Doe, O=ACME, C=US"
actually come from the same business party and could lead
to valid messages put in quarantine or even being rejected.

This problem does neither exist in the traditional EDI-world
(using partner IDs), nor in the paper-world (using letter-heads),
where names of individuals are just attributes (payload) that
only occasionally is of any importance to the receiver.

But some business systems manage by _tailoring_ the "receiver"
code for each CA.    I.e. in the case above by only using O and C.
If the receiver instead is deciphering a web-server certificate
the entire Subject string or just CN should be used (to get a stable
identity property string).

Some vendors, like VeriSign have introduced DUNS numbers
as a private _option_ which just makes things even worse.

Permanent identifiers added another [but standardized]
way of screwing up RP software by making DN interpretation
an option that the CA may or may not support.

Anyway, this leads to essentially zero interoperability
compared to using shared secrets, de-facto making "open"
PKI a joke as it is _technically__impossible_ to create shrink-
wrapped RP-software that will work on the level needed by
business software, that simply cannot rely on the availability
of local PKI-gurus for carrying out day-to-day operations.

Unfortunately it seems that few (any?) PKI researchers are
interested in bothering with "low-level" stuff like compatibility
with existing business systems and processes, as most PKI experts
think in terms of signed e-mail which is a trivial  problem as the
relying party is usually _human_ that can do all kinds of more or
less clever decisions regarding unknown CAs, names etc.

Computerized RPs are _several_magnitudes_ harder to support
as things in the digital world are either TRUE or FALSE.

==============================================
I hate to admit it, but as long as this problem stays un-addressed,
it is better to refrain to Lynn Wheeler's relying-party-only PKI.
Or do as I propose: Only use web-server certificates from leading
commercial CAs, for inter-organization-messages as these are the
only certificates that are globally trusted, feature globally unique
static identifiers (in the CN), and are both easy and affordable to buy.
==============================================

Anders

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From: Carl Ellison <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2002 01:23:59 -0700

Anders,

	thank you for your comments.  They were both refreshing and
informative.

	Have you read the papers from this year's (2002) PKI Workshop (link
in my original e-mail)?  You might take a look.  We had a fair amount
of good work reported and that might take the edge off your
frustration.  I am not trying to diminish the problems with current
PKI deployments or even the path that some developers are taking. 
Rather, I see signs of hope for the phoenix that will arise from the
inevitable ashes of those developments currently spinning out of
control. :)

 - Carl

At 12:16 PM 10/20/2002 +0200, Anders Rundgren wrote:
>>current efforts among PKI vendors and standards bodies, active
>>though they may be.
>
>Carl,
>the problems can be concluded as follows.

[snip]

---

From: "Anders Rundgren" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2002 11:13:03 +0200

Thanx Carl,

I assume that you refer to the TAXI paper?
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~pki02/Hallam-Baker/paper.pdf

I have two items to submit to this mess if you want.

1. The "Bank model" PKI
2. Plug-and-Play Certificates

Both are "innovative" in the sense that they formalize the
de-facto [implicit] standard that many PKI practitioners use
but are too afraid to talk about.  Or are not allowed to,
here referring to banks...

cheers,
Anders R

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Carl Ellison" <[email-masked]>
To: "Anders Rundgren" <[email-masked]>
Cc: <[email-masked]>; "Carl Ellison" <[email-masked]>; "Carl Ellison" <[email-masked]>
Sent: Tuesday, October 22, 2002 10:23
Subject: Re: 2003 PKI Research Workshop CFP

Anders,

 - Carl

[snip]

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From: David Chadwick <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2002 20:13:52 +0100

Carl

the url to pki03 does not seem to work for me. Rather I found the
correct one was

http://middleware.internet2.edu/pki03/pki03announce.shtml

David

Carl Ellison wrote:
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-- 
*****************************************************************

David W. Chadwick, BSc PhD
Professor of Information Systems Security
IS Institute, University of Salford, Salford M5 4WT
Tel: +44 161 295 5351  Fax +44 01484 532930
Mobile: +44 77 96 44 7184
Email: [email-masked]
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From: David Chadwick <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2002 20:20:20 +0100

Carl

Correction. The URL does not work with Netscape 4.7 browser, which is
the one I am using. It does work with IE though.

David

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From: Carl Ellison <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2002 23:11:29 -0700

At 08:20 PM 10/24/2002 +0100, David Chadwick wrote:
>Carl
>
>Correction. The URL does not work with Netscape 4.7 browser, which
>is the one I am using. It does work with IE though.

Thank you for doing the experiment.  That is extremely disturbing and
I will pass the word back to Internet2.  It bugs me no end when stuff
works with only one browser.

 - Carl

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From: Jean-Marc Desperrier <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2002 10:55:57 +0200

>works with only one browser.
The problem is a broken CSS link, not incompatibility in the code.