Maybe It's Snake Oil All the Way Down

[James A. Donald]

    --

> That's a red herring.  It happens to use X.509 as its
> preferred bit-bagging format for public keys, but that's
> about it.  People use self-signed certs, certs from unknown
> CAs [0], etc etc, and you don't need certs at all if you
> don't need them, <blatant self-promotion>I've just done an
> RFC draft that uses shared secret keys for mutual 
> authentication of client and server, with no need for
> certificates of any kind</blatant self-promotion>, so the use
> of certs, and in particular a hierarchical PKI, is merely an
> optional extra. It's no more required in SSL than it is in
> SSHv2.

I never figured out how to use a certificate to authenticate a
client to a web server, how to make a web form available to one
client and not another.  Where do I start?

What I and everyone else does is use a shared secret, a
password stored on the server, whereby the otherwise anonymous
client gets authenticated, then gets an ephemeral cookie
identifying him..   I cannot seem to find any how-tos or
examples for anything better, whether for IIS or apache.

As a result we each have a large number of shared secret
passwords, whereby we each log into a large number of
webservers.  Was this what the people who created this protocol
intended?


    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     Y/QLPHyeZqXrSgYZI9nQsjsk7krbgSGfCZ0BLpOt
     4gqWFWtV3GiEwWupSGyR895BQo0u2e4MmlgtpP/po


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