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To: Edward Lewis <lewis@tislabs.com>
Cc: <dnssec@cafax.se>
From: Jakob Schlyter <jakob@crt.se>
Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2001 00:09:57 +0200 (MEST)
Delivery-Date: Fri Aug 31 20:34:49 2001
In-Reply-To: <v03130302b7b42a28a58d@[199.171.39.33]>
Sender: owner-dnssec@cafax.se
Subject: Re: CERTificates and public keys

On Thu, 30 Aug 2001, Edward Lewis wrote:

> At the DNSSEC status meeting (yeah, I know, I owe minutes) Itojun asked why
> the SSH work being done use the public key record in DNS and not the CERT
> RR.  Wes and I said we'd look in to it, and we did spend a short amount of
> time talking about it.

also, ssh doesn't currently support X.509 certificates for authentication
and adding support for that is non-trivial (compared to adding support for
KEY).

> So, Wes and I would like to hear comments on why certificates would be
> an improvement upon public keys when managing infrastructure keying
> material - e.g., host keys for SSH, IPsec, etc.

CERT is good for applications using ceritificates such as IPsec or
TLS/SSL. for applications that does not need the extra "burden" of
X.509 and only need the raw public key - CERT gives you nothing but a more
complex data structure.

one can use IPsec without certificates, i.e. raw public keys - we (as in
we OpenBSD isakmpd together with Linux FreeS/WAN) tested this at the IPsec
bakeoff in Espoo a couple of weeks ago and it works very well.

	jakob


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