Status of opportunistic encryption

[Anne & Lynn Wheeler]

James A. Donald wrote:
> In an organization with hundreds of administrators
> managing tens of thousand of machines, what goes wrong
> with trusting your key store?  And who administers
> Kerberos?  Don't they have a problem with tens of
> thousands of machines?

the original pk-init draft for kerberos just had public keys being 
registered in lieu of passwords ... in much the same way that people 
register public keys as part of the "registration authority" part of a 
pki certification authority process.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#kerberos

machines then could have public keys to authenticate communicating with 
the trusted public key store (imagine it like real-time access to a 
certification authority ... in lieu of the stale, static digital 
certificates). to the extent that such machines can trust a repository 
of trusted certification authority public keys ... then they could also 
have a trusted repository of public keys for real-time communication 
with key store (where a key store might also be replicated for 
availability and scaling ... in manner analogous to the way DNS had 
replicated trusted servers).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#certless

it was only later that the draft succumbed to the pressure to also allow
PKI digital certificate mode of operation ... i.e. the machines rather 
than doing real-time authenticated communication with the trusted key 
store ... they might also use a local trusted public key repository to 
authentication certification authority digital signatures on stale, 
static digital certificates.

basically the key registration process is identical in the PKI digital 
certificate mode of operation and the certificateless public key mode of 
operation. the management of the trusted public key repository (of 
trusted "root keys ... in one case for certification authorities, in the 
other case for the key store) on each machine is effectively also 
identical. however, the certificateless public key mode uses real-time 
communication with the key store ... while the PKI digital certificate 
mode substitutes the whole digital certificate issuing, management, 
administrative, etc infrastructure overhead (in lieu of the much simpler 
real time communication).


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