Re: Pre-provisioned Key-access Proposal - Privacy Consideration Update

On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 2:24 AM, Anders Rundgren
<anders.rundgren@telia.com> wrote:
> Although I haven't received that much feedback on
>
>    http://webpki.org/papers/PKI/pki-webcrypto.pdf

There are a lot of documents and submissions for the WG to review.
This has been constantly mentioned in the past. While submissions from
non-members are valuable and considered, it may be more fruitful to
consider formally joining the WG (including IPR policy agreements) and
making a formal member submission (eg: a spec) that provides a
practical API, rather than describing the high-level objectives
without any implementation guidance or concerns.

However, as has been mentioned several times, the focus and priority
of this WG has been to resolve the low-level API issues.

For practical comments, I feel that the current doc is full of
hand-wavey ideas that provide no guidance or actual APIs that show how
many of these concepts are to work or be used. I also think that,
absent formal membership, the IPR policies likely prevent this being
something that the WG could adopt.

>
> I have updated the document with a privacy consideration section.
>
> The scheme offers no privacy silver bullet but maybe a "workable solution".
>
> A generic Web Crypto issue seems to be that either you end-up with a standardized "key-picker" (probably pretty difficult to define) which would mark the selected key as usable by the application to use with the Web Crypto API, or you leave this responsibility to the [presumably well-written] application.   The described solution bets on the latter because this is much more flexible and may even turn out to be a prerequisite for market acceptance.  However, this introduces a potential privacy risk, since there's no platform-provided protection against key "misuse".
>
> BTW, I have recently been experimenting with the extension-scheme used by for example Google to access the Android Play-store which is based on stand-alone handlers for unique protocols like "market://".  This is a strong challenger to Web Crypto solutions for pre-provisioned keys.  This scheme also fits quite nicely with the described solution.
>
> -- Anders
>
>

Received on Tuesday, 30 October 2012 11:02:34 UTC