[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [List Home]
Subject: More comments on PKI Action Plan
At the end of this message are some comments on the PKI Action Plan that I didn't see in John's email from yesterday. John, is the next step that each of the volunteers from yesterday's call finds the comments that pertain to our sections, assigns a tracking number for each comment and develops a recommendation, then sends the recommendation and tracking number to the list? Or maybe to you, so you can integrate it into your Word document? I just want to be sure I understand the process. Thanks, Steve -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [pki-issues] EEMA Comments on Action Plan Date: Tue, 21 Oct 2003 10:26:04 +0100 From: "Jeremy Hilton" <jhilton@viviale.com> To: <pki-issues@lists.oasis-open.org> Thanks for sending these on, Jeremy. Do you have permission to forward them on to others? If so, please send them to pki-issues@lists.oasis-open.org. Thanks, Steve > Jeremy Hilton wrote: > > Hi Steve, > > Herewith some initial comments on the Action Plan: > > ECAF 1> Jeremy, I think the most relevant question (again) is what > budget OASIS have to implement this action plan (which fortunately can > be called realistic rather than over-ambitious). That is where the PKI > Forum had most problems with, even though in those days they must have > had sufficient budgets - I fear they may not nowadays.. Especially > action item 2 (PKI interoperability testing, cfr. our pkiC) is known > to cost quite a bit, just to get people focused and hence get things > moving. I also hope, and we should urge them, that they will not > duplicate pkiC, but rather build on it, that's also what we did when > we embarked on pkiC early 2001: we used whatever was available and > useful coming from the PKI Forum. > > ECAF 2> Jeremy, I fully support <ECAF 1's> comments. I would add that > as well as pkiC, the OASIS activity should also take into > consideration the recent interoperability work undertaken in Japan. > > I particularly support the concept of application guidelines/standards > "cookbooks".. anything that OASIS can do to overcome the > real/potential interoperability issues for vendors and user > organisations should be welcomed. Providing some assurance that the > products from vendor "x" will work with products from vendors "y" and > "z" would be very very helpful in this increasingly "joined-up" world > of ours. > > I will forward more as they arrive. > > TTFN > > Jeremy > > Jeremy Hilton > +44 7753 816596 -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Notes from PKI Labs/PKI Workshop Concall Date: Fri, 24 Oct 2003 17:36:04 -0400 From: Steve Hanna <steve.hanna@sun.com> To: PKI TC Issues SC <pki-issues@lists.oasis-open.org> Here are my notes from the PKI Labs/PKI Workshop conference call on Monday, October 21. * Krishna Sankar was especially enthusiastic about our work. He encouraged us to have a paper and a panel at the PKI Workshop. Krishna also asked me to send him the full list of obstacles that we brainstormed last spring while preparing the survey. I'll do so. * For educational materials, focus on applications and scenarios. Not technology. * What do the respondents mean by electronic commerce? I said we don't know. We may need to do some more work there. * What do the respondents mean by document signing? I explained that we *did* get more details about that. Neal McBurnett said we should develop examples and scenarios. Then standards and tools (open source or not) can be developed from those. * Neal McBurnett said Open Source software is very important for driving PKI adoption. A lot of projects start small as informal pilots. Without free software (CA software and document signing and email...), this can't happen and adoption is slowed. * Krishna asked what research opportunities were uncovered by this survey. I said I don't know. I'll have to think about that. So there's some more input for our discussions. I hope we can meet soon! We have a lot of things to talk about. Thanks, Steve -------- Original Message -------- Subject: RE: [pki-tc] Proposed changes to PKI Action Plan comments Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2003 19:00:00 -0700 From: "Pawluk, Jean" <jpawluk@inovant.com> To: "'Steve Hanna'" <steve.hanna@sun.com>,PKI TC <pki-tc@lists.oasis-open.org> Steve and all, Due to a prior commitment I will miss the majority of the call. However, I would like to add the following comments that I wrote a couple of years ago to t= he IETF PKIX group and I still have not seen a lot of improvement (unless you call looking at= the many vendors slowly sinking into oblivion a solution) from the users point of view. As I have often said, just as a airplane is a very complex bit of machinery that somehow ge= ts off the ground and can transport me from one location to another as a passenger, we need t= o make=20 security solutions such as PKI as easy to use from the passenger (user) point of view. I d= on't want to know=20 about the mechanism unless I am the mechanic or pilot, I just want to pay my fare and to my d= estination. What are we doing to make those seamless yet secure applications a reality ? I think we a= s industry may have done too much work on practices yet very little on how to use it easily. Why shoul= d anyone other than industry specialist be expected to know or care how PKI works? Its ti= me to think outside the PKI silo, so please keep up the good work to date with survey with actions to i= mprove everyone's lot. Regards Jean Sent: Monday, November 12, 2001 12:51 PM To: ietf-pkix=40imc.org=20 Ah, so we are back to one of the original questions of everyday transactions -=20 Who do I trust and just how much do I really trust them? On an everyday basis, people everywhere apply some decision making process (with or without full awareness of the process) to every transaction that occurs between them. To take this a step further, business policy applied to computing systems often tries to make this sort of decision process and apply it to applications. PKI is one way that this trust binding is attempted and it often fails quite miserably. Humans seem to do this relatively effortlessly based on their experiences. What's really wrong with PKI is that is it is difficult for most people to implement and costly to use and it just doesn't happen as quickly as some human judgment call on who they trust in any transaction. Where is the granularity of trust levels, the recognition that trust is temporal and transitive presented in a fairly simple way for the everyday programmer use? We can now plaster the world with X509 certificates in various forms that work the way it was intended (and this has taken several years) but we as a group have done little to make it easy and relatively idiot proof to use PKI in applications (and there are many perfect idiots in our wide world). I have looked into and tested many a CA vendor's toolkit and let me say it just isn't easy to use any of them. Where is the application enabling middleware that is easy to use? (Yes, there are several other standards groups addressing this is some piecemeal fashion and there are some vendors who are beginning to address this space.) I look at a lot of the work being done with PKI and XML in wonderment of really allowing the =22average=22 (read, less experienced) programmer who will follow some standard and then really botch things up, expose keys, etc due to lack of knowledge on how to do it securely. Let's get real and do something about all this, that makes PKI an easy and reliable method of enabling trust on an everyday basis with all the goodness that PKI offers instead of making it so difficult that the average user would rather get a root canal than use PKI. Just my opinion, Jean Pawluk PS As an architect and senior manager I am often astounded how many firms do not know their own business well enough to decide what needs to be secured. -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Proposed changes to PKI Action Plan Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2003 16:58:51 -0400 From: Steve Hanna <steve.hanna@sun.com> To: PKI TC <pki-tc@lists.oasis-open.org> Here is a summary of changes to the PKI Action Plan that have been suggested during the last few weeks of confidential review. I have divided these proposed changes into two categories: 1) those that I think may be controversial or that are especially substantive and should therefore be discussed in the PKI TC meeting on Monday 2) those that I don't think we need to discuss, since there is probably a consensus on them Please bring this email to our Monday meeting so we can discuss these changes. If you have received any other suggestions for changes, please send them to the PKI TC email list. Also let me know if you think I have missed any changes sent to the PKI TC list. I will note here again that I am concerned the PKI TC will become overwhelmed by the volume of comments. I expect this will be even more of a problem once we open the document up for public review. I suggest again that we consider creating an Action Plan editing committee that would receive comments, evaluate them to decide how they should be handled, and send periodic reports to the PKI TC on what comments have been received and how they have been handled. I will raise this as a formal proposal at our meeting on Monday. Thanks, Steve P.S. I'm a little concerned about copyright issues when taking changes verbatim from someone's suggestion. Unless we have explicit permission from an author to use their wording in our Action Plan, I will reword things enough to resolve copyright concerns. Sun Microsystems (my employer) has agreed to donate copyright on my work on this document to OASIS. And I'm going to considerable lengths to make sure that I don't copy text from anywhere. ------- Proposed Changes to be discussed: [Removed changes 1-6 since they were discussed during the October PKI TC concall] 7. From HEPKI-TAG: * Prebaked PKI configurations have been tried and they weren't used. Like PKI Lite. * The reason why they haven't been used is that it's so hard to get lightweight CA and application software. 8. From HEPKI-TAG: * With web-based PKI, there's no way to force the user to reauthenticate. That's a problem if the user has walked away from their desk, leaving their smart card or soft token activated. 9. From HEPKI-TAG: * Are you [the PKI TC] going to act before February? 10. From HEPKI-TAG: * Applications should use the PKI support that's built into the operating system. Then they'll get smart card support automatically. 11. From a HEPKI-TAG Member: > Too Much Focus on Technology, Not Enough on Need [highly ranked] Instead of "more education for management and users" (which is like saying "You're not smart enough!") I think what you're hearing is level-headed folks pointing out that PKI is not magic pixie dust. I think the appropriate response to this one is to focus on applications and specific requirements of significant user communities. That's what you're starting to do in terms of the focus on application guidelines for document signing, secure email and electronic commerce, so that's good. > Ask Application Vendors What They Need In concert with the comment above, I think asking *user* communities what they need is really important. E.g. what do they want in terms of that nebulous "electronic commerce"? Does that really mean "I want to make money so I'll go where the money is - commerce?", or does it mean something else more helpful? E.g. what aspects of "secure email" are they really looking for? Absence of spam? Confidentiality? Authentication? Might non-PKI methods (e.g. opportunistic encryption of smtp and/or other changes to the email infrastructure) be more feasible? 12. From a HEPKI-TAG Member: And on document signing, for me the biggest issue is document formats and providing some assurance that what you signed is what you saw. Both of these are hard in the current environment. The most popular "document" formats are proprietary, complex and very susceptible to making them look one way when signed and another way when validated. This makes interoperability pretty hard. An update on xml-signature would be nice. But I'm personally still a fan of plain text signed with S/MIME or PGP until something better comes along. 13. From Anders Rundgren: AFAIK web-based signing in spite of being a much needed feature for on-line activties is not even a standards task. Every bank, e-government have therefore to deploy their own unique or purchased signature plugin. 14. From Anders Rundgren: I seems that the standards used for on-line certification suffer from a real-world disconnect as well as being non-standard. Microsoft's Xenroll is a non-portable solution. I'm puzzled that nobody digs into this as on-line certification schemes are the only thing that scales. The real-world disconnect is that in all *real* certification schemes for individuals the *provider* wants to control every parameter it can. BTW, if somebody is interested in this area I'm interested in doing something here! 15. From Anders Rundgren: AFAIK none of the major leading or obscure vendors of PKI-enabled cards have donated support to Windows. 16. From FPKITWG: In further discussion of costs, ROI was mentioned by some as the real key to addressing costs. Others, including Michele Rubenstein, expressed the view that someone needs to come up with documentation on the total cost of ownership for PKI, not just ROI. She mentioned some related work that the Directory Forum in the Open Group is pursuing for directory. 17. From FPKITWG: The only real discussion of the action plan was around testing. The PKITS and NIST Protection Profiles are familiar to this group and will address interop issued that relate to conformance (as well as a common set of functions for all clients). However for non-path-validation topics there was some interest in the Open Group taking up a role for other testing. Note that there were some Open Group folks in the room and it was they who expressed this interest.
[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [List Home]