Re: [TLS] Please discuss: draft-housley-evidence-extns-00

[Martin Rex <martin.rex@xxxxxxx>]

Stefan Santesson wrote:
> 
> If we leave the concept of evidence out of scope and leave it to the
> lawyers to worry about, is there any technical merits?

Well, this amounts to

  Capture&sign it all the bits and let the lawyers sort it out.

and bears some similarity to the concept

  Shoot 'em all and let God sort 'em out.


Think about what this means for a contract between two
parties:  Instead of using a blank sheet of paper to write down
your contract, you take an arbitrary printed multi-page book from
the shelf, write the clauses of your contract on the remaining white
spots and pages of that book and require the signature on the entire
book and feed the result to the lawyers.



home_pw@xxxxxxx wrote:
>
> Consumer-provider: I'll assume here you are making an
> allusion to the writer-to-reader concept from the DoD/NSA
> email world (which started out as something simple: the user
> agent software needs proof of user (I.e. human) presence,
> before rendering the de-ciphered confidential blob in the
> clear on a trusted display).

One of the guidelines of security engineering (according to Google
it seems to originate from Mark Twain) goes like this:

   Put all your eggs in one basket, and WATCH THAT BASKET!

The TLS Evidence proposal applied to the above means that you
put up additional baskets and distributed eggs on every access.


Since the proposal is quite secretive about the specific requirements
and usage scenarios leading to this proposal, it is difficult to assess
whether adequate enigneering went into the proposed solution to meet
the requirements and minimize risk and security impacts/collateral damage.


-Martin



_______________________________________________
TLS mailing list
TLS@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/tls