[mm] delegating SSL certificates

[Dirk-Willem van Gulik]

On Mar 16, 2008, at 7:52 PM, Ben Laurie wrote:

> Dirk-Willem van Gulik wrote:
>> So I'd argue that while x509, its CA's and its CRL's are a serious  
>> pain to deal** with, and seem add little value if you assume avery  
>> diligent and experienced operational team -- they do provide a  
>> useful 'procedural' framework and workflow-guide which is in itself  
>> very valuable, relatively robust and are a little bit  
>> organisationally "inherently fail-safe". The latter as you are  
>> forced to think about expiry of the assertions, what to do when a  
>> CRL is too old and so on.
>
> I think there's a large gulf between the use case where the relying  
> party and the CA are the same entity, and where they do not even  
> have a contractual arrangement.

I think you are hitting a key point here. In a way - a CA (or some sub- 
CA) is less of an authority and more of a, ideally, somewhat  
consistent organizational realm.

> CAs within a corporate environment may well be a good idea in some  
> cases, indeed. As you know, we've been pushing on this idea at the  
> Apache Software Foundation for some time now, hindered only by our  
> laziness :-)

And at the same time we need to learn to, or be weaned away from, the  
hardened shell perimeter ideas, that of a single super reliable root -  
and start to see a CA as something like one of the Kerberos KDC's we  
trust, just a NIS+ server we like, etc.

Dw

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