RE: generation of private keys

[Stefan Kelm <kelm@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Carlisle,

> All he's saying is that it may not matter who generated the key pair
> (regardless of how wonderfully competent they were).  If the escrowing is
> done in an incompetent way, then it's all pointless.

It certainly is. That's why I thought an indicator for the key generation
location would be a good thing. Someone might not want to use another
end entity's certificate because the corresponding private key was
generated by a CA and therefore might be escrowed somewhere (of course, the
contrary scenario might happen as well).

Anyway. Thanks for the clarification.  :-)

> > Warwick and Carlisle: could you please elaborate on why you'd prefer an
> > enumeration rather than a boolean?
>
>
> I did not say that I would prefer an enumeration; I said that an enumeration
> would be perfectly fine with me (i.e., if that's what people want then I
> won't object).  My concern was that the CA may not be able to determine who
> generated the key pair in such an air-tight way as to be able to state this
> authoritatively in a certificate and stand behind it in a legal sense.

I would tend to agree. That's why I suggested a boolean in the first
place. An enumeration sounds much mure useful though.

Putting on a "legal hat" on the other hand (I'm not a lawyer either), things
could become even more difficult because one might argue about how to
define the term "CA", i.e. is the key generation unit part of the CA or
is it part of a separate organizational unit in a legal sense?

> Warwick suggested that the CA may be able to do this based upon its trust
> relationships with other entities and upon secure communications paths
> between itself and those entities.  Fair enough (I am not a lawyer, so I
> won't hazard a guess on this).
>
> A Boolean is certainly simpler (and presumably a CA can say with confidence
> whether or not it generated the key pair itself).  However, an enumerated
> provides more information (which may, in fact, be needed for the German
> digital signature law) and so may be more useful.  I could live with either.

The German law explicitly allows for the keys to be generated by either the
user or the CA although key generation by the user is unlikely to happen
due to the requirements (see Juergen's mail). My motivation for suggesting
an extension was the standpoint of an end entity, the law does not
require such information.

Cheers,

        Stefan.

______________________________________________________________________________
Stefan Kelm            PGP key: "finger kelm@www.pca.dfn.de" or via key server
DFN-PCA, University of Hamburg                               <kelm@pca.dfn.de>
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