[Cryptography] To what is Anderson referring here?

[ianG]

On 5/06/2014 06:12 am, Christian Huitema wrote:
>> I would call the RSA comment perverse but not entirely inaccurate.  RSA
>> patent was a hugely influential force in the choice of SSL/RSA/certs in
>> the 1994 timeframe.  This model was imposed more from a marketing pov
>> (RSADSI had a patent to sell..).
> 
> I was not trying to be perverse.


Just for clarification, I wasn't trying to imply you were perverse --
but that the link is perverse.

> I remember big debates in the IETF in the
> late 90's about default profiles for IPSEC/IKE, DNS SEC, etc. In all these
> cases, the RSA patent issue was raised, and standards eventually settled to
> some patent free option as the default. Why else do you believe we find all
> these references to DSA in the 90's RFC? 
> 
> Check for example RFC 2535 (http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2535.txt), the
> specification of DNS SEC dating from 1999. You will see in the "KEY
> Algorithm Number Specification" that RSA/MD5 [RFC 2537] is "recommended" but
> DSA [RFC 2536] is "mandatory." Lots of time and energy was expanded dealing
> with that...


Right.  But the original quote is this:

       "A security-economics example is the
       thicket of conflicting patent claims on
       authentication protocols, one of the two
       main reasons we’ve been unable to improve
       browser security and deal with phishing...."

Tie RSA to phishing?  So, yes, RSA patent was a big issue in IETF WGs,
we all recall the noise.  But not in secure browsing, which relied on
TLS which had RSA and it got DSA/ElGamel patent free suites as well.
According to the noise, RSA+certs *was the solution to authentication*.

Which was what was broken by phishing.

I think the original claim needs evidence.  Yes, there is a link or
links.  But there wasn't any direct noise connecting the two, and there
was a lot of noise to choose from.



Probably what we could do is construct an argument that goes thusly:

Patents allowed RSA to be controlled.  This allowed RSADSI to force
Netscape into adopting certificates for SSLv2.  This paid RSADSI a huge
bounty, and created another huge bounty, Verisign.  This then created an
industrial standards-complex that locked the certificate into the
authentication hole of the puzzle for all time for all secure browsing
for all muggles.

When the cert/PKI/TLS/x509/secure browsing/RSA royalties/architecture
was breached by phishing, the industrial standards-complex that
stretched from WG to vendor to CA to NIST to parts undiscovered was
unable to respond.

As the ISC was built on and required a patent as the keystone, then it
could be said that patents are to blame for phishing.



But it's a longish story.  Most people will not understand it, not want
to believe it, prefer to keep their jobs and talk about other things. So
I called it perverse :)



iang