Subject: RE: Trivial PKI Question

From: Roger Younglove <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 5 Mar 2003 10:49:41 -0500

Anders, comments inserted IMHO

Roger Younglove, CISSP, IAM
Principal Consultant
NetWorks Group
O. 810.225.4800 ex. 2245
M. 810.599.0879
E. [email-masked]
www.networksgroup.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Anders Rundgren [mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: Wednesday, March 05, 2003 6:54 AM
To: [email-masked]
Cc: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: Trivial PKI Question

Chris,
Thanx for your answers.  Here are some replies.

>> Question:  How should the identity as expressed in the document
>> relate to the identity as expressed by the signer's certificate?

>There may be no relationship at all. Their identity as a private
>individual may be irrelevant, subjugated by their role as the person
>in Big Buyer Corp who authorizes such payments digitally. Also,
>the creator of the order may not be the person who is authorized
>to digitally sign it.

This "works" in the paper-world as people are "flexible".  Automated
receivers OTOH are very unlikely to be able handle arbitrary schemes.
Using a business system as a mid-tier eliminates the need to move the
arbitrary-ness of the paper-world into the e-world.
**RY it will also work in the e-world as only specified digital signatures
will be accepted on order forms from specific companies.

Taken from another field:  I'm pretty sure that no e-government program
will ever consider accepting anything but a one-to-one match between
a citizen's ID (as they see it) and what a citizen certificate contains.
But
they also have to build special purpose RP software (due to the dys-
functional X.500 naming system) in order to do that.  In addition to
requiring CAs to follow their _hard-coded_ naming conventions.

<snip>

> The two are likely to contain different certificatePolicies.

<CertificatePolicyRant>
It is interesting to note that CPSs are frequently mentioned in this context
in spite of the fact that none of the major crypto-packages (Windows
and Java) offers any way to specify CPSs as a part of a CA trust acceptance
process.  The reason for this is simple: Computers don't understand
legal matters and CPSs are deployment-wise anything but standardized.
Peter Gutman's term "Kitchen sink extensions" is a fair description of
the value of CPSs for practical purposes.  Do "SysAdmins" ever
bother about the CPS of their VeriSign web-server certificates?
My Thawt web-server cert does not even have a CPS extension and
I haven't missed it that much. 
**RY CPs and CPSs are not written for electronic review and system ADmins
are not required to see, review or understand them. 
 CPSs were designed by lawyers for lawyers. 
**RY Not totally true. A CP is written for the Relying Party to understand
and agree that the operation of the CA provides the RP the ability to rely
on the certificates. The CPS ensures the RP that the CA meets the operating
requirements of the CP therefore ensuring the reliability of the certificate
used.
 But lawyers do not run e-business systems, write application
software packages, or know how to handle a Java keystore.
**RY that is correct however lawyers are responsible for the liability
incurred by CAs and RPs.
</CertificatePolicyRant>

<snip>

>> To create a foundation for more frictionless PKI-secured e-business,
>> I think that there *long-term* should be a one-to-one mapping between
>> [basic] business message identities and certificate identities.

>A kind of time-stamped intersection entity that comes between person
>and process ? A signed transaction ? Isn't this what Notaries were
>supposed to be for ?

<snip>

As as final note, I would like to express a whish that the S/MIME and
PKIX WGs start looking a bit above the ASN.1-level, to also address
deployment issues and shrink-wrap SW support. 
**RY If I understand the role of the IETF WGs correctly it is not with in
our area to do those things.
 There must be more than
one reason why practically no app outside of e-mail offer built-in PKI
support.

Regards
Anders R

---

From: "Anders Rundgren" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 6 Mar 2003 10:17:20 +0100

Roger,

>will be accepted on order forms from specific companies.

If we now try to scale-up the partner network to the size of major
manufacturers with tenth of thousands of suppliers, how exactly
is this going to work?  "Only specified digital signatures" sounds
very much as out-of-band, small scale etc.  How should an automated
process be able to cope with that?

>**RY If I understand the role of the IETF WGs correctly it is not with
>in our area to do those things.

One can note that the only PKIs working on a global scale, are building
on a one-to-one identity mapping between the entity's perceived identity
and the identity as expressed in the certificate.  Yes, I of course refer to
e-mail and web-server certificates.   Other aspiring users of PKI, like
e-commerce, have not even *begun* to look into the naming issue as
apparently nobody feels that it is "their business".  Who are we waiting for?
The IETF, OASIS, W3C, EU, or the UN?   Or are we maybe waiting for
Microsoft and VeriSign?  I believe the two latter will do this 4US as the
standards committees seem to be out of ideas, direction, competence and
ambitions.  We will some time in the future, be discussing in this very list,
the s.c. "completely broken MS/VS-scheme", that then will be the de-facto
PKI naming standard.  :-)

rgds
Anders

---

From: Jimi Thompson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 6 Mar 2003 19:30:24 -0600

>the s.c. "completely broken MS/VS-scheme", that then will be the de-facto

I personally have observed the absolute mess Microsoft and Verisign 
have made of things.  They are, as are most corporation, motivated by 
profit.  They just happen to be a bit more motivated than most.  I 
don't want to see them setting any kind of a de-facto standard.  I'll 
gladly work on the naming issue.

-- 
Thanks,

Ms. Jimi Thompson, CISSP, Rev.

"If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the 
computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles 
per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside." -- 
Robert Cringely