Fixing SSL (was Re: Dutch Transport Card Broken)

[Peter Gutmann]

Philipp =?iso-8859-1?q?G=FChring?= <pg at futureware.at> writes:

>I had the feeling that Microsoft wants to abandon the usage of client
>certificates completely, and move the people to CardSpace instead.

While there's an obvious interpretation of that ("Microsoft want to lock
everyone into CardSpace"), there's a second interpretation that's equally
likely: After > 10 years of effort and getting almost exactly nowhere with
client certs, Microsoft are moving on to something more likely to succeed
(actually I have no idea how workable CardSpace is since I don't think
anyone's done any usability studies on it, but I doubt it's more unworkable
than client certs.  Is anyone aware of any third-party usability studies on
CardSpace, OpenID, ...?).

>But how do you sign your emails with CardSpace?

Does anyone care that you can't sign your emails with CardSpace?

(I could post my standard reference on this here again :-).  The unwashed
masses don't even know what signed email is, let alone care about using it.  I
know that there are assorted corporates and so on that are still keen on email
signing, but they can keep playing with PKI for that.  CardSpace/Liberty/
OpenID/SAML/whatever[0] should handle the rest.

Eventually.

Peter.

[0] I'm not sure whether putting "CardSpace" and "Liberty" in such close
    proximity in the above line was a good idea.  If your monitor starts 
    smoking due to the friction generated, please cut&paste one of the two 
    elsewhere.

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