Subject: [Trans] Log checking should be asynchronous (Re: Volunteer opportunity! (was Re: DNSSEC also needs CT))

From: Nico Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Jun 2014 11:57:19 -0500

On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 3:41 AM, Dmitry Belyavsky <[email-masked]> wrote:
> Here are my ideas about "strict" behaviour of the TLS client:
>
> [...]

IMO log checking should be mostly asynchronous.  This means that CT
couldn't detect MITMing CAs in real-time, but that's OK because CT is
about CA reputation, and all we care about is that when we detect
lying CAs we can report them.

This means that clients mostly should only reject TLS connections when
there's no evidence of server certs being logged in an acceptable log.

It also means we need some mechanism for reporting lying CAs.  Thus
far reporting via blogs, news outlets, and trust anchor set managers,
has been good enough, and I'm not sure that we need anything more than
any async notification to users (and upstreams) by browsers (and other
clients).

There are privacy protection considerations in reporting lying CAs:
report the name about which they lied, just the log entry(ies) that
are missing, or just an assertion that they lied?

Again, as I see it CT is purely a reputation-based system.  Reputation
is established (and blemished/destroyed) asynchronously.

This is important: we cannot be adding too much latency to TLS.  By
doing log checking asynchronously we won't be.

Nico
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