To:
Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu>
Cc:
Ted.Hardie@nominum.com, Edward Lewis <lewis@tislabs.com>, keydist@cafax.se
From:
Derek Atkins <warlord@MIT.EDU>
Date:
09 Jan 2002 16:11:24 -0500
In-Reply-To:
Keith Moore's message of "Wed, 09 Jan 2002 15:48:53 -0500"
Sender:
owner-keydist@cafax.se
Subject:
Re: From whence we came...
Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu> writes: > It's not clear to me why you need to verify the authenticity or > integrity of a blob if you can't interpret the blob anyway. Perhaps. But keep in mind that there are some blobs that don't have any internal integrity/origin protection at all (eg. ssh keys or freeswan keys). DNSSec fills that void perfectly. > I'm aware that the discussion started in terms of using DNS. I don't > know how the charter will end up, whether it will presume DNS as part > of the solution or not. IMHO it would be wrong for the charter to > presume DNS distribution and DNSSEC as mechanisms even if the charter > were limited to associating key material with DNS-based names. Honestly, I don't think we want to try solving the whole key distribution problem. I think we should definitely keep ourselves limited in scope. In particular, I think we should limit ourselves to distributing keys for identities that can be represented as DNS names (definitely host names, maybe user names). > I agree that there is a large set of applications for which DNS should > be part of the mechanism for locating keys. Any application that > wants to associate meaning with DNS names, and probably IP addresses, > would be a likely customer for such a mechanism. > > Whether DNS is a good mechanism for actually distributing keys is a > different question. Several limitations in the DNS protocol make > me dubious about this. I'd like to hear your reasoning for this, but perhaps that should be taken offline? > Whether DNSSEC is a good mechanism to verify the authenticity of keys > is yet another question. As far as I can tell DNSSEC is potentially useful > but has narrower applicability than the general key distribution mechanism > being considered. Agreed. There are some keys for which DNSSec is absolutely necessary. There are other keys for which DNSSec would be nice but isn't necessarily required. > Keith -derek -- Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board (SIPB) URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/ PP-ASEL-IA N1NWH warlord@MIT.EDU PGP key available