*PKI Labs Conference Call*
March 18, 2003

*Attendees*

Neal McBurnett (convener) - Internet2

Bob Brentrup - Dartmouth
Sean Smith - Dartmouth

Eric Norman - Wisconsin

Peter Honeyman - Michigan
Carl Ellison - Intel
Lisa Hogeboom - Internet2
Steve Olshansky - Internet2

Ben Chinowsky (scribe) - Internet2

*Discussion*

The minutes of the previous meeting were approved without changes.

Sean was at Princeton last week and learned about research into possible new hardware-based attacks:
- Andrew Appel asks how to seize control of a virtual machine even if all the usual countermeasures are successful, and suggests inducing memory errors (e.g., by heating up the computer) and using a special Java program to exploit the resulting security vulnerabilities. See http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/memerr.pdf.
- Another colleague noted the possibility of looking at the CPU spec to see which instructions use lots of power, then using this information to introduce carefully targeted spikes in the power supply, for example when critical instructions are being executed. Peter has heard of similar work being pursued elsewhere.

Peter noted that a severe vulnerability in Kerberos v4 has just been reported: the K4 ticket representation allows a chosen-plaintext attack. See http://web.mit.edu/kerberos/www/advisories/MITKRB5-SA-2003-004-krb4.txt. The possible impact is particularly severe at Michigan, which uses K4 for Active Directory integration. Eric noted that a timing attack on SSL is also generating concern; see http://www.openssl.org/news/secadv_20030317.txt.

Eric noted that Sun is dropping CMS from its product line, and is rumored to be getting out of the PKI business entirely. Bob B. observed that the big question this raises is what the costs of moving to a replacement vendor will be.

Bob B. reported that Dartmouth students are trying to build a "BlitzBerry", a BlackBerry-like device that works on 802.11 using BlitzMail, Dartmouth's local mail system. The project is bringing up interesting issues with security; the group wants to see if the BlitzBerry can be made to work with Dartmouth's pre-existing "almost-PKI".

Wisconsin is working with Dartmouth to build a PKI spanning both Labs. Eric noted that Wisconsin has hired Mairead Martin to manage its middleware efforts more generally.

The Second Annual PKI Research Workshop is April 28-29. Twelve papers have been selected; panel topics and participants have still to be decided. The group reviewed the discussion at the last Program Committee meeting and discussed possible panel topics and panelists.

The next PKI Labs conference call will take place Tuesday, April 15, at 4:00 PM Eastern; this is 24 hours after the regularly-scheduled time.