On Sat, Feb 16, 2013 at 1:55 PM, Ben Laurie <benl@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 16 February 2013 10:22, Phillip Hallam-Baker <hallam@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:Note that we do not expect CAs to talk to _all_ log servers, only
> Sorry for the delay but I have been thinking of CT and in particular the
> issues of
>
> * Latency for the CA waiting for a notary server to respond
> * Business models for notary servers
>
> As a rule open source software works really well as the marginal cost of
> production is zero. Open source services tend to sux because even though the
> marginal cost of a service is negligible, large numbers times negligible
> adds up to big numbers. Running a DNS server for a university department
> costs very little, running it for the whole university starts to cost real
> money and running a registry like .com with 99.9999% reliability ends up
> with $100 million hardware costs.
>
> So the idea that I plug my business into a network of notary servers being
> run by amateurs or as a community service is a non-starter for me. We have
> to align the responsibility for running any server that the CA has a
> critical dependency on with a business model.
those that are appropriately responsive - and also note that a CA can
fire off a dozen log requests in parallel and then just use the first
three that come back, which would deal with any temporary log issues.
We should probably add this ability to the open source stack at some point.
Isn't this part the only part that's actually needed? The
> Looking at the CT proposal, it seems to me that we could fix the business
> model issue and remove a lot of the CA operational issues as follows:
>
> 1) Each browser provider that is interested in enforcing a CT requirement
> stands up a meta-notary server.
>
> 2) Each CA runs their own notary server and this is the only resource that
> needs to have a check in at certificate issue.
meta-notaries seem like redundant extra complication (and also sound
like they fulfil essentially the same role as monitors).
I assume, btw, that by "notary server" you mean "log server"?
Also, if a CA only uses its own log, what happens when it screws up
and gets its log struck off the list of trusted logs? This is why we
recommend some redundancy in log signatures.
That is the reason for checkpointing against meta notaries.
Otherwise a CA might not actually release the logs.
Website: http://hallambaker.com/