A mighty fortress is our PKI

[Anne & Lynn Wheeler]

On 07/27/2010 12:09 PM, Pat Farrell wrote:
> Most of which we avoided by skipping the cert concept. Still, better
> technology has nothing to do with business success.
>
> Public Key Crypto with out all the cruft of PKI. Its still a good
> idea.

that became apparent in the use of SSL between all the merchant servers and the payment gateway. by the time the registration and setup process was completed at both ends ... the certificate was purely an artificial attribute of the crypto library being used. there were other issues with the payment gateway protocol ... i was able to mandate things like mutual authentication ... which didn't exist in the crypto library up to that point ... however the exchange of certificates was so engrained that it wasn't possible to eliminate (even tho all the necessary information already existed at both end-points).

the merchant server/browser part ... I could only recommend ... I couldn't mandate.

my analogy is that certificates & PKI are electronic analogy of the letters of credit/introduction from the sailing ship days ... when the relying party had no other recourse for information about the stranger that they were dealing with. This was left over from the dail-up email days of the early 80s (dial-up electronic post-office, exchange email, hangup, and possibly have first-time email from complete stranger).

that design point was quickly vanishing in the 90s with the pervasive growth of the online internet.

I as at annual ACM sigmod conference in the early 90s ... and one of the big sessions, somebody asked on of the panelists what was all this x.50x gorp about. Eventually somebody explained that it was a bunch of networking engineers attempting to re-invent 1960s database technologies .... with certificates being armored, stand-alone, stale representation of some information from a database someplace. In the later 90s, certificates attempted to find place in no-value market niches (aka, situations involving no-value operations that couldn't justify online &/or real-time information) ... although this got into some conflicts ... trying to address no-value market-niche ... at the same time claiming high-value, expensive operation.

There were businesses cases floated to venture community claiming $20B certificate market ... i.e. that every person in the country would have $100/annum certificate ... some predicting that the financial community would underwrite the cost. When that didn't happen, there were other approaches. We had been called in to help wordsmith the cal. state electronic signature legislation ... which was being heavily lobbied by the PKI industry to mandate certificates.

I could that rube-goldberg OCSP was response to interaction I had with some of the participants ... somebody bemoaning the fact that the financial industry needed to be brought into 20th century requiring certificates appended to every financial transaction. I responded that stale, static certificates would be retrenching to before the advent of online, real-time point-of-sale payment transactions ... aka a major step backward, not a step forward.

Besides the appending a stale, static certificate to every payment transaction being redundant and superfluous ... it also represents enormous overhead bloat. There were some reduced financial, "relying-party-only" certificates being floated in the mid-90s ... which were still 100 times larger than the typical payment payload size (increase the size of payment transaction payload by a factor of 100 times for no beneficial purpose).

The X9 financial standard group ... had some participants recognizing the enormous overhead bloat certificates represented in payments started a compressed certificate standards activity ... possibly looking to reduce the 100 times overhead bloat to only 5-10 times overhead bloat (although still redundant and superfluous). One of their techniques was that all information that was common in every certificate ... could be eliminated. Then all information that the relying party already had could be eliminated. I was able to trivial show, that a relying party would have access to every piece of information in a certificate ... and therefor digital certificates could be compressed to zero bytes.

Then rather than arguing whether it was mandated that every payment transaction have an appended certificate ... we could mandate that every payment transaction have a zero-byte appended certificate.

disclaimer ... eventually had a couple dozen (assigned, retain no interest) patents in the area of certificate-less public key (some showing up long after we were gone) ... summary here
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadssummary.htm

-- 
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

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