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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
by 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 agoYou 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 agoYou'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.
- tptacek 7y agoNo. We're talking talking about global PKI. See: rest of thread. You're the one who's departed from the topic.
- Avamander 7y ago> S/MIME might be a failure Primarily because very few e-mail clients support it and no web client seems to. > Correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIU CMS is the basis for various European digital identity systems Yes, they're in theory trying to legislate the same thing across EU what Estonia has done.