On 9/6/2013 10:35 PM, Melinda Shore wrote:
One of the useful things that PKI provides is some agreement, at least, about what we expect from certification authorities and what it means to issue and sign a certificate. That is to say, the semantics are reasonably well sorted-out, which is not the case with pgp. Melinda
Much of the discussions also deals with how protocol implementators, i.e., mail, browser, routers market, has added these as features. Are they secured out of the box?
For example, the browser market has recently began to enable OCSP (Online Certificate Status Protocol) out of the box. Is this good or bad? Is this further violation of privacy? an ethical concern. Is it more 3rd party tracking, monitoring with a good security purpose?
Add the same concept to the address bar searching methodologies that are now also enabling the out of the box for further 3rd party search and tracking path.
Add to that Javascript, 3rd party cookies and cross domain communications, once a major taboo, is now enabled out of the box. The enabling of "ping home" and "cross talking" ideas across the board, it is all enabled now.
Overall, we lost the focus of private by design with this exploding need to socialize and share information mentality. Its not end to end any more. Its an OPT-OUT, not OPT-IN mentality. The market is allowing it to happen, is it because they are aware of this and a made a choice or they don't even know it was even an issue?
The IETF methodology needs to be revamped to lead the way ago, take more charge of not being so relaxed in its security aspects towards communications protocols. Consolidation of information is a start.
We knew since the beginning of SMTP how it was well known the SMTP (821) sender/return path was not secured. Too much spoofing potential, yet it was written in stone in RFC2821 not to hurt a useful feature because of an ignorant bad guy. Well, we finally recognized the bad guy was no longer ignorant by RFC5321. It took nearly a score of years to begin to address it, we have SPF for example, we have DKIM too.
And even then, we are still too relaxed. I have always called for strong exclusive end to end, i.e., SPF -ALL, policies when possible. ADSP for DKIM, etc.
But overall, we allowed too much security relaxation into the protocols, making it them work with much lower payoffs and much more waste on the system. We passed the buck to others and the future to address these well known issues. Too much time wasted.
The IETF can do better to lead the way. -- HLS