On 5/2/2022 9:24 PM, Keith Moore wrote:
On 5/2/22 09:20, John R Levine wrote:
We have several decades of S/MIME and PGP failing because nobody
knows how to do key distribution at scale.
...
User interface issues seem like some of the more significant problems
because (for example) it really does make sense for the President's
secretary to sign an email from the President. How do you communicate
to users who has the authority to sign something for purpose A but not
purpose B? And yet, humans have been doing similar things with
signatures on paper for many centuries. I don't think it's an
unsolvable problem unless perhaps you want to cram all of that
information on a watch face.
...
So I see a lot of careful engineering that's needed, and a lot of user
interface work (which is admittedly problematic for IETF), and
probably some hard political work by honest people to overcome the
efforts of dishonest people who will try to subvert it (whether or not
they believe they're doing good).
But I don't think there are fundamentally unsolvable technical
problems, so much as problems that make people uncomfortable - because
there's no simple system that spans a wide enough range of compromises
to suit everyone. But that doesn't mean that there's no system that
doesn't solve most people's problems.
There are many technical problems, but there also some pretty
fundamental User Interaction issues. The way I think of this problem is
"I want to find the electronic address of the person whom I call Alice
Example". That kind of name is not unique in general, but it is unique
enough for me -- cryptographers often refer to this as a "pet name".
Doing that in a centralized service is hard. You have to assume that a
variety of phishers are going to try insert their own set of metadata in
the service database. I might have better chances asking my friends, who
may well understand who I refer to as "Alice Example". And maybe we
could develop some kind of friend-to-friend service overlaid over a
social network. But if we are not careful, it will be easy to leave
enough holes to let a whole raft of phishermen through...
-- Christian Huitema
