[Cryptography] PRISM PROOF Email

Phillip Hallam-Baker hallam at gmail.com
Fri Aug 23 13:53:27 EDT 2013


On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 6:02 PM, Philip Whitehouse <philip at whiuk.com> wrote:

> Let me just see if I get where you're going:
>


> So essentially you've increased the number of CAs to the number of
> companies without really solving the PRISM problem. The sheer number mean
> it's impractical to do much more than a cursory check before approval.
>

The number of CAs would not need to be very large, I would expect it to be
in the hundreds in a global system but that is pretty much a function of
their being hundreds of countries.

If example.com wanted to run their own CA for their own email certs then
the way to do it would be to issue them a cert signing cert that has name
constraints to limit its use to just name at example.com.


The idea is that there are multiple CAs but their actions are all vetted
for transparency and they all check up on each other.

Any one CA can be served with an NSL, but if they issue a coerced
certificate it will be immediately visible to the target. So a government
can perform a DoS attack but not get away with an impersonation attack.



> PRISM for email is bad because we don't even know who we can trust. I
> can't trust the provider because they could have been served an NSL. The
> provider has to see the metadata or they can't route the email. So I'm
> doomed. Best case is I can secure the contents and use an alternate name.
> At that point I need an organization I trust to act as my Omnibroker who
> for some reason I don't trust with the mail itself.
>
> One other question: PPE = Prism Proof Email?
>
> Nor do I think key chain length was the problem - initial key
> authentication and distribution is the first issue.
>
> Philip Whitehouse
>


Well the way that was solved in practice for PGP was Brian LaMachia's PGP
Key server :-) Which turned into a node of very high degree...


-- 
Website: http://hallambaker.com/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/attachments/20130823/6ae85747/attachment.html>


More information about the cryptography mailing list