4 ms·

> But where are the examples of all the "stuff" that would benefit by being linked into a single global PKI? Estonia's national system and its e-services are a

> But where are the examples of all the "stuff" that would benefit by being linked into a single global PKI? Estonia's national system and its e-services are a local example of a single central PKI. Provided services and systems seem to be far ahead of basically all other countries. Identity theft, identification, authentication, signing etc. have been solved for nearly two decades now and I have to say the way the rest of the world does stuff looks stone-age to me. For example I loathe how I've been asked to do identity verification by foreign companies "send us a picture of your ID", WTF. Sentences like "Use SMS 2FA to protect your account", "e-mail us the bill" and "come to our office to sign {x}" make me shudder, it's absolutely dogs*.

pvg 7y ago
It's not an example of a global PKI and worse, Estonia had to invalidate/patch everyone's e-ids once already. A hassle somewhat mitigated by the fact that fewer people live in Estonia than in the Bronx.
- Avamander 7y ago
  What is one relatively trivial patch compared to the plethora of other worse issues you have, the time and money you waste?
  - akerl_ 7y ago
    Having to patch a country’s worth of deployed hardware tokens doesn’t sound like a trivial effort to me.
    - jkachmar 7y ago
      Not GP, but: I think the point is more that even the (massive) concentrated effort it takes to patch the IDs will be less than the collective impact of not having those IDs at all (in terms of the convenience it would add to peoples’ lives) OR having the IDs without the patches at all.
  - pvg 7y ago
    It's not an example of global PKI either way. It's essentially a city-sized experiment in using cryptographic technology.
    - Avamander 7y ago
      It's the closest to global we've had that involves actual people and agencies, not just computers. Dismissing it only gets you "send us a picture of your gas bill to prove your identity"-level hindrance and mess.
wahern 7y ago
The anti-PKI crowd are getting waayyyyy ahead of themselves. Pretty much any large deployment of public-key cryptographic needs some sort of PKI. Any framework where there's a third-party authority that signs keys requires some sort of PKI, directly, indirectly, or both. And there's almost always such a third-party because otherwise public-key cryptography is barely just a step ahead of shared secrets. This is especially true when you have distinct vendors, but I can guarantee you that even Signal has an internal PKI framework, independent of the Android PKI framework that it also implicitly relies upon. Someone else thread mentioned S/MIME. S/MIME might be a failure, but S/MIME is a thin wrapper around CMS (Content Messaging Syntax), which is widely deployed standard for signing, authenticating, and encrypting content. It's based on the same ASN.1 standards as PKIX. And like PKIX, the root authorities are whatever you want them to be; the standards just provide the syntax and semantics for building the PKI and providing interoperable messaging. Correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIU CMS is the basis for various European digital identity systems. See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAdES_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAdES_(computing)
- tptacek 7y ago
  You tried the same rhetorical sleight of hand in a different thread a week ago; what you're doing is claiming that any use of asymmetric cryptography is by definition a form of PKI, when what we're talking about --- top-down tree-structured global PKI --- is clearly different from what they're doing. Your point about S/MIME and CMS kind of makes my overall point for me. Sure. A global PKI is super useful for making things like CMS happen.
  - wahern 7y ago
    You're talking about global PKI. But the "public" in PKI doesn't imply global any more than the public in public-key cryptography does. What PKI does usually imply is some sort of top-down tree of trust and mechanisms and policy for managing and verifying that tree. But the roots of that tree of trust don't have to be global, and with the exception of Web PKI aren't. You're creating the straw man. You keep saying that new protocols don't need PKI. Well, if we accept your criteria for what PKI means, and considering that the only example that meets your criteria, past, present, or future, is Web PKI, then what exactly is the point of your argument? If you have a beef against PKIX, CMS, X.509, ASN.1 etc--i.e. the mechanisms--then just say so. There's a ton of reasonable criticism to be made there. But those things are not equivalent to "PKI". There are plenty of PKI systems out there that make use of alternative mechanisms, though mostly proprietary and hidden as interoperability usually demands making use of pre-existing standards. But, to reiterate, using those standards to build a PKI system absolutely does not require relying on the same global roots of trusts. Nothing in those standards even identifies such a root or the shape of the tree at all.

pvg 7y ago

It's not an example of a global PKI and worse, Estonia had to invalidate/patch everyone's e-ids once already. A hassle somewhat mitigated by the fact that fewer people live in Estonia than in the Bronx.

Avamander 7y ago
What is one relatively trivial patch compared to the plethora of other worse issues you have, the time and money you waste?
- akerl_ 7y ago
  Having to patch a country’s worth of deployed hardware tokens doesn’t sound like a trivial effort to me.
  - jkachmar 7y ago
    Not GP, but: I think the point is more that even the (massive) concentrated effort it takes to patch the IDs will be less than the collective impact of not having those IDs at all (in terms of the convenience it would add to peoples’ lives) OR having the IDs without the patches at all.
- pvg 7y ago
  It's not an example of global PKI either way. It's essentially a city-sized experiment in using cryptographic technology.
  - Avamander 7y ago
    It's the closest to global we've had that involves actual people and agencies, not just computers. Dismissing it only gets you "send us a picture of your gas bill to prove your identity"-level hindrance and mess.

wahern 7y ago

The anti-PKI crowd are getting waayyyyy ahead of themselves. Pretty much any large deployment of public-key cryptographic needs some sort of PKI. Any framework where there's a third-party authority that signs keys requires some sort of PKI, directly, indirectly, or both. And there's almost always such a third-party because otherwise public-key cryptography is barely just a step ahead of shared secrets. This is especially true when you have distinct vendors, but I can guarantee you that even Signal has an internal PKI framework, independent of the Android PKI framework that it also implicitly relies upon. Someone else thread mentioned S/MIME. S/MIME might be a failure, but S/MIME is a thin wrapper around CMS (Content Messaging Syntax), which is widely deployed standard for signing, authenticating, and encrypting content. It's based on the same ASN.1 standards as PKIX. And like PKIX, the root authorities are whatever you want them to be; the standards just provide the syntax and semantics for building the PKI and providing interoperable messaging. Correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIU CMS is the basis for various European digital identity systems. See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAdES_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAdES_(computing)

tptacek 7y ago
You tried the same rhetorical sleight of hand in a different thread a week ago; what you're doing is claiming that any use of asymmetric cryptography is by definition a form of PKI, when what we're talking about --- top-down tree-structured global PKI --- is clearly different from what they're doing. Your point about S/MIME and CMS kind of makes my overall point for me. Sure. A global PKI is super useful for making things like CMS happen.
- wahern 7y ago
  You're talking about global PKI. But the "public" in PKI doesn't imply global any more than the public in public-key cryptography does. What PKI does usually imply is some sort of top-down tree of trust and mechanisms and policy for managing and verifying that tree. But the roots of that tree of trust don't have to be global, and with the exception of Web PKI aren't. You're creating the straw man. You keep saying that new protocols don't need PKI. Well, if we accept your criteria for what PKI means, and considering that the only example that meets your criteria, past, present, or future, is Web PKI, then what exactly is the point of your argument? If you have a beef against PKIX, CMS, X.509, ASN.1 etc--i.e. the mechanisms--then just say so. There's a ton of reasonable criticism to be made there. But those things are not equivalent to "PKI". There are plenty of PKI systems out there that make use of alternative mechanisms, though mostly proprietary and hidden as interoperability usually demands making use of pre-existing standards. But, to reiterate, using those standards to build a PKI system absolutely does not require relying on the same global roots of trusts. Nothing in those standards even identifies such a root or the shape of the tree at all.