Re: The purpose of this mailing list

["William H. Geiger III" <whgiii@xxxxxxxxxx>]

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In <t53iuw2k1u4.fsf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, on 09/15/97 
   at 11:56 AM, Marc Horowitz <marc@xxxxxxxxxx> said:

>Jon Callas <jon@xxxxxxx> writes:

>>> The biggest advantage of a PGP cert has is the way that it is "agile" as
>>> I've heard some people call it. If you want to look at how you fit PGP into
>>> a world that thinks names are important, you can use an email address as a
>>> DN. If you want to use PGP in a name where keys are important, use the
>>> fingerprint (or key proper) as a DN. No biggie. In fact, one of the central
>>> points of the way the web of trust is organized relates directly to
>>> resolving this apparent dichotomy. The PGP software, since its earliest
>>> days, manages this apparent dichotomy. The beauty of PGP as a PKI is that
>>> it can easily bridge an X.509-like, name-centric world to a SPKI-like,
>>> key-centric world.

>I see one problem with this approach, and that is in looking up keys. If
>we use the email address as the DN, then DNS will make an excellent
>mechanism for looking up keys.  Of course, email addresses have certain
>problems as DN's, as Carl will point out of I don't.  If we think of the
>key as the DN, then we avoid those problems, but create a different one:
>given a signature, how do I find the key to use to verify it?  Past
>solutions are to carry certs around within every message, which is
>inefficient, or to have a global index, which doesn't scale.

>We need to solve this problem.  One option which comes to mind is to
>include a "domain name" for the a pgp cert RR with the message instead of
>the cert itself; this does not need to be signed, as the message
>verification will fail if it is modified.  Unfortunately, this has the
>problem that cert domain names may change or go away, making verification
>in the future difficult unless a long-term cert cache is kept near the
>message.

I see some serious problems with using the DNS for key lookups &
distribution.

- -- What do we do with keys than do not have a "domain"?

- -- What do we do with sites that do not wish to manage PGP keys?
(currently the PKI is being done on a volentary basis).

- -- How do we solve the problem of redundance? ie where are the backups?

- -- How do we handle keys that cover multiple domains?

- -- What do we do about domains where PGP is illegal?? (Russia, France,
China, Cuba, ...)



- -- 
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William H. Geiger III  http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii
Geiger Consulting    Cooking With Warp 4.0

Author of E-Secure - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice
PGP & MR/2 the only way for secure e-mail.
OS/2 PGP 2.6.3a at: http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii/pgpmr2.html                        
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