- From: Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net>
- Date: Sat, 6 Aug 2011 12:22:54 +0200
- To: Anders Rundgren <anders.rundgren@telia.com>
- Cc: "public-identity@w3.org" <public-identity@w3.org>
On 6 Aug 2011, at 12:06, Anders Rundgren wrote: > On 2011-08-06 11:38, Henry Story wrote: >> On 6 Aug 2011, at 10:04, Anders Rundgren wrote: >>> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2011Aug/0033.html >>> >>> W3C is like PKIX working with the idea of upgrading existing schemes >>> rather than starting with a requirement specification and see where >>> that leads you. >>> >>> I don't think W3C's revised <keygen> will go anywhere because a 2-phase >>> protocol doesn't really cut it. Apple's already deployed scheme for iPhone >>> is considerably more powerful and user-friendly. >> >> The MD5 situation can be mitigated by the server using a time based challenge. >> This can reduce the attack surface to a few minutes. I doubt md5 is that bad. >> But better security would be better of course. > > Yes, I think this particular "problem" is irrelevant and doesn't need solving. > >> I wrote this up the different ways of creating certificates here >> >> http://www.w3.org/wiki/Foaf%2Bssl/Clients#Support_for_easy_creation_of_certificates >> >> What I am still not clear about is what could go wrong. I thought I had understood >> that for a while, but I realised I am not clear about that. After all a public >> certificate is no use if you do not have the private key corresponding to the public key >> published in the certificate. So even if someone took the public key generated by the browser >> there is not much they could do with it. >> >> Can you fill be in again here? I feel like there is something I am missing here, and I would >> like to fill in the whole in the wiki above. > > That's absolutely correct, you get nowhere with a certificate without > the matching private key. In fact, the PoP (Proof-of-Possession) schemes > featured in enrollment schemes are redundant. Attestations of the kind > there are in ETSI/3GPP and TCG protocols OTOH, actually fills a purpose > since they identify the key-container. Ah you mean the crypto key, or the telephone keychain? I suppose that is nice if you want to tie someone to a device, but problematic if you want more self asserted identity for privacy reasons. It could be that there is space for both schemes. > > >> By the way I don't see how what Apple is doing could have a better user interface. >> The user interface for keygen is: click a button. Unless they move to mind reading... > > Well, user-interface is just one aspect but if we concentrate on that one, Apple's > solution eliminates the confusing strong/weak button. Agree, the strong/weak button should just be a hint. Mind you it could be thought of that way. Opera gives way too many options there, Other browsers give much fewer. So it would not be impossible to have a browser just give none. Work to eliminate that button to everyone's satisfaction would certainly be welcome. > > Anders > >> >> Henry >> >> >>> >>> Anders >>> >> >> Social Web Architect >> http://bblfish.net/ >> >> >> > Social Web Architect http://bblfish.net/
Received on Saturday, 6 August 2011 10:23:30 UTC