*PKI Labs Conference Call*
December 18, 2001

*Attendees*

Neal McBurnett (convener) - Internet2

Bob Brentrup - Dartmouth
Ed Feustel - Dartmouth
Sean Smith - Dartmouth

Eric Norman - Wisconsin
Keith Hazelton - Wisconsin

Bob Morgan - Washington
Carl Ellison - Intel
Bob Moskowitz - ICSA Labs/TruSecure
Renee Frost - Michigan/Internet2
Ken Klingenstein - Colorado/Internet2

Ben Chinowsky (scribe) - Internet2

*Discussion*

The discussion opened with a review of a hot topic from last week's IETF: patent claims are now being made for all strong password methods, including SRP. Apparently all claimants intend to charge for these technologies; as SRP is widely used, this is expected to make quite an impact. [See http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/mailinglists/ips/mail/msg08027.html for details.] Bob Morgan described this as "a real bummer", although he also pointed out that "to the extent that certs are desperately depending on the failure of all other mechanisms", this development may speed deployment of certs. There was general agreement that there is a dire need for the Patent Office to get better at finding prior art. Bob Moskowitz noted that the Security Area Advisory Group (http://jis.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/saag/) is now the main place in IETF for discussion of intellectual property issues. Neal summed up with a "woe is us", and there was general agreement.

There was a short discussion of the prevailing user-unfriendliness of current methods of using raw public keys to set up new devices; Bob Morgan has recently run into this with OpenSSH, and the problem also exists for HIP and uPnP. One emerging common solution is to ship devices with keys already installed, as some cell phone companies are now doing. [AI] Bob Moskowitz and Carl will further discuss ways of increasing the user-friendliness of using raw public keys to set up devices.

Eric noted that Audun Josang [http://security.dstc.edu.au/staff/ajosang/] has attempted to quantify the relationship between trust and trust-chain length; his research tends to bear out the view that longer chains are less trustworthy.

In other IETF news, Bob Morgan noted that the S/MIME working group has decided not to pursue any of the various incompatible proposals submitted for coping with the malicious-forwarding attacks described by Don Davis. Bob Moskowitz noted that the IPsec requirements group is coming together. They plan to produce exact and complete documentation of interoperability requirements -- something people can test their products against -- with the overall goal of getting closer to having IPsec and PKI work together right off the shelf.

Sean updated the group on his students' progress. Shan Jiang presented at ACSA and graduated. Eileen Zishuang Ye has designed a spoofing-resistant browser; the implementation will be mostly based on Mozilla. Yasir Ali is working on incorporating PKI into OpenSSH so the user doesn't have to remember the fingerprints of trusted machines. [AI] Carl will send Sean a suggestion for using authZ certs instead of name certs in Yasir's project, and cc the PKI Labs list. Carl also pointed out that SSL uses name certs as authZ certs -- if you're person X, you can perform action Y. John Marchesini will soon have a paper available on the Dartmouth PKI Labs site. Ramia is working on signed Word documents. By using macros to get information from the Web, it is possible to (for example) create a document that is timestamped for December but that tells you who won the Super Bowl; a January demo is planned. [AI] Sean will set up a submissions page for the PKI Research Workshop, using passwords for security at first.

At Wisconsin, the S/MIME pilot is just getting started after months of being bogged down in regulatory issues. Eric is working on a scheme for doing delegation with name certs, using SPKI but doing everything with 4-tuples instead of 5-tuples; Carl pointed out that Rivest and Lampson did this in SDSI 1.0.

Three action items have been completed since the last call:

[20-November-2001 - Eric will write up his thoughts on name-based access control.]
See Eric's email of December 11.

[20-November-2001 - Peter will send the list a URL for Olga's and Andy's report on using KX.509 for authorization for GARA, the Globus Architecture for Resource Allocation.]
[10-September-2001 - Peter will send the list references to his work on Kerberos/PKI integration.]
At http://www.citi.umich.edu/techreports/, see respectively "A Practical Distributed Authorization System for GARA" (tech report 01-14) and "Kerberized Credential Translation: a Solution to Web Access Control" (tech report 01-05).

The group agreed to try establishing a regular conference call schedule of 4pm EST (2100 UTC) on the second Monday of each month; the next PKI Labs call will therefore be at 4pm EST on Monday, January 14.

*Action Items*

[AI] 18-December-2001 - Bob Moskowitz and Carl will further discuss ways of increasing the user-friendliness of using raw public keys to set up devices.
[AI] 18-December-2001 - Carl will send Sean a suggestion for using authZ certs instead of name certs in Yasir's project, and cc the PKI Labs list.
[AI] 18-December-2001 - Sean will set up a submissions page for the PKI Research Workshop, using passwords for security at first.
[AI] 20-November-2001 - All will a) disseminate the PKI Research Workshop CFP far and wide, and b) personally contact people who are likely to be interested in participating in the Workshop.
[AI] 20-November-2001 - Eric will forward Bob Juenemann's comments on why PKI hasn't taken off yet.
[AI] 10-September-2001 - Eric will a) investigate and document a problem that Ed has encountered with using PKIUser objects to get certs from LDAP directories (what the user sees in the retrieved cert is only a fingerprint, not cert details), and b) send the list information on his experience with cert retrieval using Internet Explorer.
[AI] 13-August - Bob Moskowitz will forward the list email on PKI work at Fannie Mae.
[AI] 4-June - Bob Moskowitz will send the list information on Federal work related to attribute certs.