Welome to the Internet, here's your private key

Jaap-Henk Hoepman hoepman at cs.utwente.nl
Mon Feb 4 08:45:28 EST 2002


It's worse: it's even accepted practice among certain security specialists. One
of them involved in the development of a CA service once told me that they
intended the CA to generate the key pair. After regaining consciousness I asked
him why he thought violating one of the main principles of public key
cryptography was a good idea. His answer basically ran as follows: if the CA is
going to be liable, they want to be sure the key is strong and not
compromised. He said that the PC platform of an ordinary user simply wasn't
secure/trusted enough to generate keys on. The system might not generate `good
enough' randomness, or might have been compromised by a trojan.

Jaap-Henk

On Sun, 3 Feb 2002 15:09:57 +0100  pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz writes:
> It is accepted practice among security people that you generate your own
> private key.  It is also, unfortunately, accepted practice among non-security
> people that your CA generates your private key for you and then mails it to
> you as a PKCS #12 file (for bonus points the password is often included in
> the same or another email).  Requests to have the client generate the key
> themselves and submit the public portion for certification are met with
> bafflement, outright refusal, or at best grudging acceptance if they're big
> enough to have some clout.  This isn't a one-off exception, this is more or
> less the norm for private industry working with established (rather than
> internal, roll-your-own) CAs.  This isn't the outcome of pressure from
> shadowy government agencies, this is just how things are done.  Be afraid.
> 

-- 
Jaap-Henk Hoepman             | Come sail your ships around me
Dept. of Computer Science     | And burn your bridges down
University of Twente          |       Nick Cave - "Ship Song"
Email: hoepman at cs.utwente.nl === WWW: www.cs.utwente.nl/~hoepman
Phone: +31 53 4893795 === Secr: +31 53 4893770 === Fax: +31 53 4894590
PGP ID: 0xF52E26DD  Fingerprint: 1AED DDEB C7F1 DBB3  0556 4732 4217 ABEF


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