Subject: Re: [Raven] Fly away, raven

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Oct 1999 17:08:02 -0600 (MDT)

> From: Grenville Armitage <[email-masked]>

> > That's great.  I similarly think that designing purposeful security
> > holes into a product is fantasy heads-in-the-sand behavior.  Thanks
> > for offering the parsimonious phrase for it.
>
> Agreed. And that has _what_ to do with the scenario I've been
> suggesting?

Designing purposeful, middle-ground, standardized, security holes is what
you have been advocating.  Yes, assuming bugs in neither the holes nor
the auditing, yours are well behaved holes that remember who used them.
Still, as far as both users of the communications channels, the police
using the holes, and the providers and vendors supporting them are
concerned, they are holes.  They are designed to give people other than
the nominal users access to the data in the channel.  In all other cases,
everyone calls such things security holes.

By definition, a tap is a security hole.  It may be a trivial hole no one
worries about if no cleartext is deciphered (e.g. tcpdump against people
with common sense), but it is still a hole.

That's much of the disagreement between those few who have acquiescent
things about the idea of the IETF helping any law enforcement tapping
protocols and the majority.  If the tapping is of any use to the police,
it must be a hole in the security of the nominal users.  Thus, the majority
sees any tapping as a security hole, including tcpdump and RMON but
particularly anything that would give any third parties any cleartext.
Some of the minority somehow sees stealing secrets from those who own (or
speak) them as other than a security issue.  Perhaps they define "security"
differently, perhaps as "security force" to applied to armies when they
are "restoring order" by shooting civilians or deposing legitmately elected
governments.

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]

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---

From: Grenville Armitage <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Oct 1999 16:21:23 -0700

Vernon Schryver wrote:
	[..]

>  They are designed to give people other than

Until you, and a few others, can get over this insistence that I'm
advocating tapping we cannot have discourse. I am not. I'm advocating
that the IESG impose an auditing requirement on anyone's proposals
for 'IETF tapping capabilities'.

What you don't seem to have grokked is that I see no problem with
such an IESG stance forcing the development of specs that no
self-respecting LEA would want to use. A subtle form of rebellion,
and apparently too subtle by half.

gja