Hi,
Not want to disturb anyone with legal stuff, but in many cases the applicable law establishes some minimum actions to undertake in case a CA stops operations. I.e. article 21 of the Spanish Law 59/2003, on electronic signatures, says something like "a CA wanting to cease operations shall inform within two months its subscribers and will be allowed to transfer, with their express consent, the management of valid certificates to another CA or revoke them".
Up to this, no one has any effective protection against a CA going off business which doesn't inform of anything, therefore the third paragraph of this art. 21 says that the CA will transfer the Science and Technology Ministry (today the Industry, Commerce and Tourism Ministry) the revocation information.
With this information, the Ministry will maintain a public service informing of the revocation status of the certificates.
Not bad at all, but even in this case a CA could not transfer this information to the Ministry.
Therefore, the best "continuity" strategy to be able to validate signatures is, in my opinion, to implement a signature completion and maintenance process, getting all the relevant evidential material (such as CRLs or OCSP responses) and store it.
ETSI CAdES and XAdES specs provide full guidance on this, just as CEN CWA 14171 does.
Best,
Ignacio
-----Mensaje original-----
De: owner-ietf-pkix@xxxxxxxxxxxx en nombre de Peter Gutmann
Enviado el: mié 11/07/2007 13:06
Para: denis.pinkas@xxxxxxxx; pgut001@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
CC: ietf-pkix@xxxxxxx; Joel_Kazin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Asunto: Re: PKI Disaster Recovery and Key Rollover
"Denis Pinkas" <denis.pinkas@xxxxxxxx> writes:
>Here is an extract from ETSI TS 101 456:
Hmm, OK, what I was looking for was more of a list of issues from the
user/EE/relying-party point of view, things that they have to consider when
dealing with a CA. To take one oft-quoted case:
- the CA shall destroy, or withdraw from use, its private keys, as defined
in clause 7.2.6.
that's never going to happen in the real world because the only asset left to
a CA when it goes out of business is its private key, and the liquidators are
never going to allow the deliberate destruction of corporate assets in this
manner. More importantly, even if the CA had some policy related to this
while it was still operating, once it's in receivership the policy becomes
void. It's a bit like Tony Bartoletti's suggestion for adding a crimeFree bit
to keyUsage, you can write whatever policy you like for it but when it comes
to the crunch it's not going to work the way the policy says.
So what I was looking for, if the document is looking at PKI-related disaster
recovery, is advice to users on what to do when their CA vanishes, all support
and services stop overnight (with no continuity or responsibility), and the
liquidators sell the private key on eBay.
Peter.