Re: My take on the BoF session

[Bill Sommerfeld <sommerfeld@orchard.arlington.ma.us>]

Here's a simple problem statement:

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Presuming the widespread deployment of dns security, provide
infrastructure allowing two systems on the internet to
opportunistically establish secure communications with moderate levels
of assurance with minimal to no preconfiguration.

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This is the service that both opportunistic IPsec and SSH want.

On this assurance scale, ssh as deployed provides low assurance on
first-connect time since host keys are not authenticated unless you
distribute them out-of-band.  Other mechanisms (e.g., x.509 certs)
will be used for authentication when higher levels of assurance are
needed.

The hard problem in any cryptographic security system is producing a
secure binding between names of principals which are uttered by users
and the cryptographic keys which serve as a proxy for the principals
on the network.  

Secured DNS zones provide a secured binding between names and RR's, so
it can potentially be used to bootstrap a DNS name into a key.

						- Bill