Is The Public Key Infrastructure Outdated? 54
dchat writes: "Roger Clarke, Visiting Fellow, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology at the Australian National University claims that the "Conventional, hierarchical PKI, built around the ISO standard X.509, has been, and will continue to be, a substantial failure", and then he goes on to explain why.
I'd be interested in the views of Slashdot users, as my organisation is contemplating considerable investment in X.500 and PKI (including X.509)." Lots to read here.
Re:Considerable investment? (Score:3)
That would be hella-stupid, unless you have people on staff who are *extremely* qualified at implementing cryptography. 4000 bit keys are useless if you make a moronic mistake implementing the key system. If you need security, use PGP, GPG, SSH, or some other reliable, already implemented open protocal.
Considerable investment? (Score:1)
People are under the misguided impression today that the available products and services are always the best. It's trivial to set up something like a proprietary key setup in C++. The docs are all out there. Hell, I implemented a 512-bit version of DES for a computer project at Sarah Lawrence College (my school) last year.
hmm (Score:1)
commodores are outdated but we dont anounce it
instead we build our fast nix boxens
makes sense to me...
philosophy of cryptology (Score:2)
Damn, all those PKI users will have to upgrade (Score:2)
It's in the implementation.. (Score:4)
Re:Outdated? (Score:1)
Re:US Government thinks it's a good idea. 'nuff sa (Score:1)
Good ol' Dick Cheney seems like just the sort of guy to make sure national ID smart-cards with certification are put into place and the sooner the better. You'll need one to vote. He and his boss won't want to go through another election like THIS again, so in the future they will want to nip any recount talk in the bud. I believe Gore would think that's not a bad idea, either, but he and Lieberman probably wouldn't push the plan.
And for those who say the voting process rests with each state, that's true, but they'll just set a national "best practices" standard and should a state not comply then they'll just withhold Federal highway funds. They like that trick. The US government will become the ultimate CA. Think about it. What do you want Uncle Sam to do for you? Let you vote? The government needs to know who you are. Need Medicare assistance? They need to know who you are. Want a small business loan? ID checks are mandatory. Decide you'd like to have some of your social security "investment" back when you're 65? They DEFINITELY want to know who you are then. Want to perform banking transactions? Banks are required to tell the government about all large transactions. How large, you ask? Consider that the biggest denomination of US currency is $100 and why.
Re:An informed, yet biased reply (Score:2)
Re:Considerable investment? (Score:1)
Frums
Re:Considerable investment? (Score:3)
Re:Hey look! (Score:1)
Even reading at "0" is intolerable.
Re:More brain dead linking (Score:1)
Re:hierarchical PKI is doomed.. (Score:3)
also, there's the issue of accountability. with PKI you can use post offices, biometrics, chips etc. what do you do with individualized systems when you want to do a first transaction between a person and a website? you can't use 'reputation' without some universal identifier that would make these individualized systems useless if it worked. so what's left, credit card or social security numbers? how do you transmit to be used in a crypto-system you haven't yet established (because you're going to use these numbers as keys for the system). they can be intercepted, and if you don't use these numbers what have you got left? there has got to be some global protocol for the initial communication, and everyone needs a public key. the only advantage of PKI over a credit card or soc # is that you don't care if people intercept your PKI public key!
The role of insurance (Score:1)
This suggests that the only thing really needed to e-commerce is not trust between parties but the availability of cheap insurance against fraud. A digital identification mechanism's minimal requirement is that it allow insurance companies to manage their risks. A scheme would be good enough if the dollar amount of fraud that it allows is less than the cost of eliminating it (that doesn't refer to SPKI which has a different focus).
I have no idea what that is the implication of what I just said; I hope someone else has;-).
not a viable option for e-commerce (Score:1)
suppose also that you have reason to suspect that it may be someone with ill intent toward you who caused this error by invading the mail server. the company also suspects e-espionage from activist groups.
so the strawberries decompose quickly on your front lawn. setting aside the issue of scavenging animals, who is liable for the error? is it you in a "buyer beware" situation? is it the company for not providing better authentication or calling you up to confirm (defeating the point of e-commerce), or is it in some strange way the mail servers who are liable?
You might respond that you system is just for communication, not for e-commerce. Fine, but we need something that is for e-commerce, so we need to keep looking.
PKI a pain in my arse (Score:2)
Getting a certificate is slow (may take several weeks) and expensive (~$100/year), making it prohbitive to small organizations and individuals. Only capital rich organizations should have encryption is the moral of that story!
The technology is too complicated. Installing a cert is a pain, and riddled with unneccessarily complex encryption jargon. All I want is a secure web server, but to get it I have to learn about a variety of different certificate and key formats.
The browser makers (who distribute the top-level certs) operate a functional cartel with the certificate companies (Verisign, Thawte etc), to prevent real competition for certficate producers. You need to be in the club to get your certs distributed, and hence recognized by browsers.
The certificate companies have no interest in providing certificate granting authority certificates. For example, suppose I'm a large organization such as a University, and I want the right to grant certificates for departments, units and individuals within my organization (on the grounds that I, the bureaucracy have the tools to authenticate their identities). Even though the technology permits this -- I could have a certificate granting certificate, issued by one of the cert. companies. It won't happen. The reason being that the cert companies have no incentive to give away their primary business asset -- the right to create certs.
So my response is this: Lets push for PGP as the new infrastructure. It is inherently devolved, because if you have a PGP key you automatically have the right to sign someone elses key -- everyone can be a certificate authority. PGP could be bundled with web browsers and email software, along with a few central PGP keys (such as verisign and thawte). Then we could really start building that web of trust.
Re:An informed, yet biased reply (Score:1)
Attackers won't get in by defeating smartcard antitamper mechanisms any more than they get in by brute-forcing DES today. Even when the cards are perfect, there will be gaping holes in the system.
Consider for example a smartcard reader connected to a Windoze box and used to authenticate network connections. Why bother breaking the card when you could just take over [sourceforge.net] the machine once authentication is complete?
That, and DECSSS-style stupidity [wirednews.com] inside the cards should mean that hackers of all varieties will continue unimpeded.
Privacy however... now there's a problem.
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Martin
Not outdated - unworkable. (Score:1)
Where it doesn't work is when you try and bind keys to people (as the author points out). This is, in part, because people don't (can't) secure their private keys. It's also in part because the whole concept of identity is fuzzy. Identity theft is trivially easy and so it's simply not possible to create a CA that can really prove or disprove identity.
Add to that the simple fact that security based on "something you know" has never been reliable due to the propensity to share the secret and PKI becomes doomed. Moving to a "something you have" system (eg smart card) helps but now we're back to proving the device we're taking to not the user of the device.
In summary - All trust is relative - PKI assumes that absolute trust is possible and so does not work in the real world.
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Trust vs Risk (Score:1)
The cryto guys do security based on trust and come with the X.509 certs etc.
The traditional comp sec guys always use risk assessment to implement security policies. IE the trust no-one, but look at mittigating risks of trusting some(one/thing).
Thats why X.509 never took off, trust is not a good thing in comp sec - just look at the M$ security model which is based on trust and regularly show 'issues'.
PKI for open commerce. (Score:2)
The problem is, he seems to build an argument that an absolute online identity is needed, worldwide. What it *really* comes down to is this:
if you walk into a shop, do you need a passport and driving licence to buy a shirt? no, you only need money.
If you order something not currently in stock, do you expect to see the current books, proof of lease on the shop, and other forms of ID for the business? no, you make a general assessment of the odds of the shop staying in business - or pay by credit card, and rely on being able to claim back the cash if they get stung.
These same factors map well to the internet - and if you are going to have an ecommerce - orientated, hierachical trust system, the obvious candidates for top level CAs are the credit card companies themselves. AE are already moving to epidermal payment (one shot credit numbers for a single transaction) and could easily offer prepaid cards that do the same thing (in much the same way mobile phone companies can sell prepay cards for their phone service). yes, it would be possible to have each and every transaction tracked and logged as no other system of commerce has ever done before - but why do we need it?
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Re:PGP is not the answer (Score:2)
It won't - but a web-CA bought cert won't either. The correct solution for this case is for the head librarian to generate a CA key, and sign the keys of each new year's intake. That way, one key expires every year (taking the leaving students auths with it) and one new one is created each year (which is what you point out further down the chain).
In this case, you are certifying something different than the story covers - you aren't certifying the identity of the user, you are handing him an access key to a resource you control.
In theory, the Web of Trust is a long term, distributed solution to the Identity problem. In practice, it would require Perfect Users (ones that never certify incorrectly, never lose control of their own key and never attempt to obtain a false certification for personal gain) and those are a bit thin on the ground...
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Re:An informed, yet biased reply (Score:2)
Again the ingenuosity comes up... LOTS of equipment? And what skript kiddies are? They are nothing more than people using LOTS of equipment and software. Script cracking was born from the huge building of 25 years of computer cracking/hacking, when all this soft and equipment became able to be automatized. In fact a skript kiddie knows nearly nothing about the inners of the system or software it exploits. He uses the huge knowledge database hackers/crackers left and the huge level of automatisation script languages give. Nothing more.
One may think that dealing with hardware will be harder for kiddies. Are you sure of this? Are you really sure? Today some of the electronic infrastructure for smart cards systems costs only a few tens or hundreds of bucks. And already today people break, crack, rip codes from magnetic strips, chips and other stuff. Besides there are serious problems on doing security. Sometimes people try too much on doing authentication and leave other things completely untouched. Once a physical key was broken in less than 15 seconds just because the developers decided that a "if key exists then do_everything_else" would suffice.
20 years ago many people would give their hand on defending the capacity of 56 bit DES. Where we are today? Magnetic stripe cards are not a problem for ATM thieves. Even if they are 10 years old are able today to get into. Like the Kalashnikov AK-47, modern computerings gave a universal weapon for everyone. The only problem is time and a few bucks in the needed moment...
PGP is not the answer (Score:2)
And how, exactly, is the fact that your buddy down the hall in the dorms has signed your key going to do anything useful, like, for example, give you access to the items on electronic reserve at the library that have been purchased for the use of only engineering students?
On the otherhand, a central authority has the information to issue certificates that the rest of the official organizational structure can make use of.
And so, you either:
And your certificate based on this CA will, in all likelyhood accepted on campus, but this is probably a feature. When wider use of user certificates comes, and it will if the fedgov gets their disintermediation efforts off the ground, then more widely accepted root CAs will proliferate (I'm guessing credit card companies, and all levels of government).
And that's where I think the problems will really start -- it'll be just like my meatspace wallet which has am absurd number of vertification tokens in it, and knowing which you can use where and when and just carrying them all around gets cumbersome.
What would be convenient, but which gives many of us the willies is a single national certificate which can have various endorsements added to it, so if I present it to a site, they can search it for the endorsement or endorsements they want to see, but I as a simple minded user (and that's the most common kind) just 'hand them my papers'.
Re:US Government thinks it's a good idea. 'nuff sa (Score:1)
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
Re:Not outdated - unworkable. (Score:1)
Re:PGP is not the answer (Score:1)
The essence of PGP is definitely the right way to go. When you get you account, you get a key that allows you to detect that messages actually come from the account giver. When you are ready you dialog with the account giver to create a "handle" that has the opportunity to become trusted, e.g. MyFreshmanEnglisAssignme... excessive verbage deleted
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
Re:philosophy of cryptology (Score:2)
The answer to this is obvious: there is a class of person ("common" or otherwise) for whom acquisition of material wealth is the overriding goal of the game of existence. The only way to acquire large amounts of such wealth is to obtain it from large numbers of the "common man", i.e. "consumers". In order to do this most efficiently, it is necessary that consumers be separated from their money by as few clicks of the mouse as possible.
Based on this analysis, of course, it is clear that Amazon.com with its one-click patent can be said to have won this game. Nevertheless, the game continues to be played vigorously, since acquisition of wealth appears to be one of the most motivating games ever conceived.
BTW, are paragraph breaks considered a po-mo no-no?
PKI and the realworld! (Score:1)
Good Enough? (Score:3)
Duh!
There is no magic pixie dust that you can sprinkle on e-commerce (or anything else, for that matter) to make it "secure". You'll have a hard enough time just defining what "secure" really means for a given application.
The real question is, "is it good enough?". You are the only one who can answer that. Is what you are buying appropriate for your application?
One very big red flag is your comment that you are contemplating a "considerable investment". Sounds like somebody is trying to sell you a trainload of snake oil. The basics of PKI are not that complicated.
Personally, I'll trust a CA when they agree to be liable for consequential damages, ie, "We agree to pay any damages you've suffered caused by your reliance on our certificates". I'm not holding my breath.
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Re:philosophy of cryptology (Score:1)
Well what you said explains why the Amazonian dot com people should care if PKI is "An Artefact Ill-Fitted to the Needs of the Information Society."
But we're not them. What do most
POE and all that.
I think that we
Re:You're right - the world needs SPKI. (Score:1)
Big Brother (Score:1)
hierarchical PKI is doomed.. (Score:5)
I believe that what eventually will to evolve is a whole bunch of little problem-domain-specific public-key infrastructures, some of which will use x.509 certificate formats, some of which won't. pgp, ssh, secure dns, etc, all "do their own thing" and provide a public key infrastructure to attempt to solve the piece of the problem they care about without getting tangled into the morass of hierarchical PKI which caused Privacy Enhanced Mail (PEM) to sink without a trace..
An informed, yet biased reply (Score:5)
Re:Considerable investment? (Score:1)
US Government thinks it's a good idea. 'nuff said (Score:2)
13 (Score:1)
Re:hierarchical PKI is doomed.. (Score:2)
One alternative (Score:1)
There is already some support for this from a few mail clients (mostly incomplete), and from a few mail servers.
In some ways it is not as secure as the end-to-end encryption of a complete PKI solution. You have to trust the mail servers to not be compromised. But it is a lot less expensive.
Also, companies generally would like to be able to read their employees official communications even if they don't want any random person to intercept plaintext.
Security isn't the only concern. (Score:1)
Re:Big Brother (Score:2)
You're right - the world needs SPKI. (Score:4)
SPKI is the public key infrastructure that can actually achieve what it promises, because it doesn't have a root certificate that only God could properly hold. It's the ideas of PGP's Web of Trust taken to their logical conclusion. And it is simple, and neat, and easy to understand. Everyone interested in the problems with PKI should look into it.
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Bunk. (Score:5)
Either Clarke generalizes problems to all deployments of PKI, or he blames PKI for wider 'security is just plain hard' problems.
Here's some examples:
With a little more work, his paper could have been a very constructive HOWTO, to inform the reader how to set up a good PKI. However, he just rants on about problems, none of which are unique to PKI, without providing the solutions, most of which are well known.
His paper should be titled "Pitfalls to avoid when setting up a PKI".
Re:An informed, yet biased reply (Score:2)
Do you have a credit card?
Do you have an airmiles card or a "club" card?
Do you have a bank account with services attached to it for auto deposit and/or withdrawl?
Do you have a driver's license?
Do you have a listed phone number?
All of these are certificates of a form. All of these tie our person into a bank of information somewhere. All of these "corrupt" our privacy. Do you think the telemarketers are lucky at guessing your name? :-)
PKI represents another certificate in these veins, and a way to make them more network-friendly and less susceptible, as Halo- says, to simple mass impersonation and replication. Of course it isn't anonymous, and there is a privacy hole. How else do I know who you are? A perfect privacy system would allow a group of innovative individuals to put a fictitious character though university and get a degree, as long as they are consistent. Attaching a real entity to the identity of the certificate is sometimes a needed thing.
The issue in my mind is that, as has been occuring on the web of late, that the consumer has at least nominal control of that information. The collecting body may only use it in the scope of the transaction and within the confines of the business I am dealing with. It may not be sold, leased, loaned or given to any other party without my express permission.
In Canada, we have a "stored Census" database. That information may only be used to compile and prepare voter's lists. You may also opt out of that. It saves us on the order of $30 million Canadadian per election. I imagine the US would save a lot more. If you pick a distinct winner that is :-)
Ulitmately, the majority of people are probably fine not being anonymous entities, as long as the priviledge of having their information is not abused. I'd concentrate on the behaviour and responsibilities of the corporations collecting the information rather than needing a perfect system to replace the PKI. At least on the practical front.
2 cents. No change.
PKI is dead. Long live SPKI. (Score:4)
The problem with PKI is that it depends on a common trusted root, and a global namespace. It is also hampered by crude certificate revocation methods.
There is a movement towards a simpler PKI, SPKI, which addresses all those isues. Of course, there will be need for co-operation between about the both approaches.
See Carl Ellison's page [std.com] for more great info, especially a thorough comparison of approaches [std.com].
Postmodernity is critical of consumerism? (Score:1)
This is always the difficulty when using such commonly misused terms. I like to think of postmodernity as a reference to a period in history. That is, a time period. According to this way of thinking, both the prefix "post" and the "modern" part of the term seem to make good sense. Using the word in this way, even those who despise the humanities can have a clear referece as to what is being discussed.
The precise demarcations of this boundary call into question the nature of precision and boundaries as useful concepts, but that's part of the fun of it. What is clear though, is that the postmodern era has clearly been an era in which rampant consumerism has surpassed all previously conceived limits and continues to gain momentum.
Indeed, it could be argued that the technology which has defined postmodernity is built on metaphor of consumption without limit. Think of the hard drive ad . . . on a clean disk, you can see forever!
The constant consumption of ever more bandwidth and CPU cycles is further evidence that postmodernity has never stopped to question consumerism. In fact, leading consumption to ever more extreme excess is the defining movement of postmodernity.
To assume that just because some wannabee trendy-journal-scouring artists in New York call their re-cycled sentimental surrealist crap "postmodern art" implies postmodernism qustions consumerism is misguided. This kind of abuse is one of the reasons that many people get turned off as soon as they see such terms being thrown around.
And as far as public key cryptology goes, it will be useless to keep information confidential once we have all been assimilated into the borg collective. Now that is where postmodernity is joyfully leading us and that is why slashdot readers deserve better than to have such important terms abused.
use within organisation (Score:1)
Re:Outdated? (Score:2)
Being "out of date" here has nothing to do with it; the issues are based on what approach is used. Various approaches must be based on distinct underlying concepts behind privacy/encryption.
If you read the article -- especially towards the end, where the author discusses alternatives -- you learn that the danger discussed lies in the association of one specific ID to one specific person/entity. This is compounded by having keys held by single, hierarchical, authoritarian entities (thus available in principle to gov't agencies/commercial entities).
Rather than attempt to reduce risk by this approach, the author recommends a more realistic approach such as that implemented (however well or badly) by PGP: Use a "degree of risk" assessment, and facilitate multiple, decentralized assignments of person/entity to various semi-secure ID's.
The article makes me sad, because one of my battles in everyday life is to try to bring together the disparate aspects of my "self," but I fully understand why I probably should utilize multiple "nyms" if I want both to post stuff in forums like this, and be employed again at some future time! Until we live in a more trustworthy society, I am probably safer (i.e., more viable as an economic organism) with multiple identities. sigh....
Re:Bunk. (Score:1)
Which was to say, the problem is the hierachy wherein trust runs only linearly. Also, the thirty are still just multiple examples of the 'one trusted root'.
I can get a Verisign cert, or Thawte, or.... and if I present to you a signed / 'certified' check for a million $'s, would you agree it was genuine? I wouldn't.
Besides, many corporate implementations of PKI issue building-access badges to users with similar proof-of-identity requirements. Is it too much to ask to issue a smartcard at the same time? No, institutions do this today.
Absolutely, and that's not the problem. I believe the point was that the verification criteria differ widely. Then, given any cert/ID you do not have control over which attributes are presented. Prove your age, sir? Sure: Here's my name/address/key-usag/email/credit-limit....
I'm not a super-privacy zealont, but we both know that even if this information is mostly ignored, it will not change the basic fact that you cannot not present it. Whether it's a PKI-only issue or not is immaterial: He's not saying it's a PKI only issue - he's saying it's a problem with PKI - you're arguing that it isn't. Subtleness kills.
little or no choice as to who will issue the token - This is understandable, since the PKI group in an organization will typcially have determined the most appropriate security class of tokens for the deplyoment.
> Problem being the someone else part - you seem to assume they automatically know best. It's not unthinkable that someone made a poor decision, possibly in retrospect, and that you want higher security than they designed. Do you now put your ever-so-slighly-insecure smart cards within a 'secure wallet' that protects up to 5 smart cards of your choie? The whole reason we're disigning something, such as PKI, is that someone else had not been able to come up with a, to us, satisfactory solution.
And any organization who does keygen on behalf of a user is plain dumb.
Two things: You think it's dumb? So do I. But you'd be amazed how seldom dumb ideas have failed to take off.
I can give you a list of at least 5 banks that I personally have spoken to on this matter, and they are very interested in this. Yes, that would be using an HSM which is highly secure ..... So, they have my money. And, they store my key. Great. If you're in the UK, think about the RIP bill and it's impact on that key storage too.
In 4, he claims that it's possible to steal keys by breaking into a server. Again, that's up to the deployment. We recommend that keys are stored on hardware tokens. Plain and simple. Most devices do not provide for a facility to remove a key from a hardware token.
The point is that there is no way of telling how securely the key is/has been stored. Therefore, you, trusting a particular key, becomes slightly wobbly.
"Private keys are susceptible to a vast array of risks, both of capture, and of invocation without the authority of, or even knowledge of, the consumer/citizen. bunk. Plus, the rest of the paragraph doesn't really support this sentence anyway.
If we just look at the bit you used then... Are you saying there are no risks? I think that there are a number of risks, which goes back to the concept of total trust that the author cites as a basic flaw that he is not happy with.
Most people know they should read the fine print before signing something - because they know that putting a signature on a piece of paper means something.
Most users can't tell if the iKey they just stuck in their USB port was just used to log on, sign the email they wanted to sign or do something else. Of course, this can be helped, but only if there is a trusted computer/device in between - which is one of the central arguments in the papers. There isn't - at least not yet. It has to be practical too, not just techie-explainable.
In the end, you can get a lot of mileage out of a PKI, but you have to make many ssumptions. Assumptions can be dangerous.
re:that's not what I was talking about (Score:1)
Likewise, modernISM was critical of the victorian and romantic elements of modernITY. What you have done in your post is to conflate the time period with the intellectual reaction to it, confusing the -ITY with the -ISM.
If this seems like yet more 'wannabee trendy journal scouring' to you, let me put this in more easily understandable terms. The shift from the authoritative, absolute trust of SKI to the relativism of PGP is part of a larger trend of a breakdown in certainty that occured in many forms of thought in this century. This breakdown occures because every system that attempts to establish certainty is somehow flawed on its own terms.
Internet conumerism requires a great deal of certainty to be practical, so the intellectuals orchestrating the system for the masses who will use it without understanding it must therefore choose between a flawed system or one that does not support consumerism for these masses.
When you announce "where postmodenity is leading us" you are correct. But as you say Postmodernity is 'after'-'modern,' and in fact a result of the intellectual movement of a modernISM reacting against modernITY. It is fair criticsm, however, that I have been ambiguous by using the word 'Postmodern.' What I should have said is 'Postmodernist.'
PKI - a small part of the security solution. (Score:1)
Outdated? (Score:1)
More brain dead linking (Score:1)