[51277] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: introducer trust model, Was: Eat this RIAA (or, the war has begun?)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Scott Francis)
Thu Aug 22 13:21:11 2002
Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2002 10:15:58 -0700
From: Scott Francis <darkuncle@darkuncle.net>
To: "Karsten W. Rohrbach" <karsten@rohrbach.de>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
Mail-Followup-To: Scott Francis <darkuncle@darkuncle.net>,
"Karsten W. Rohrbach" <karsten@rohrbach.de>, nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <20020822142836.A92148@mail.webmonster.de>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
--Il7n/DHsA0sMLmDu
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Disposition: inline
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
On Thu, Aug 22, 2002 at 02:28:36PM +0200, karsten@rohrbach.de said:
[snip]
> thinking a little bit more about the issue with networked services in
> general (including SMTP and the spam/abuse problems, as well as
> filesharing and many more), the conclusive decision would be to define a
> bullet proof standard on introducer based trust, deriving a certain
> trust level or metric from a peer-trust based trust chain. this has
> several (dis)advantages:
> - no central authority involved, nobody will charge your creditcard for
> issuing a certificate
> - somewhat more unsharp but still pretty restrictive method of applying=
=20
> permissions to use resources
> - follows the basic paradigm behind TCP/IP, delivering a
> never-lights-out trust model that cannot be compromised easily, if it
> is good in design and implementation
What you're proposing sounds rather like the PGP Web of Trust
<http://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual.html#AEN554>. An excellent idea, but
difficult to build. Until a trust model of this type reaches a certain
critical mass, it has little effect on those outside the model. I've already
done my part by signing my friends' keys and having them sign mine, but unt=
il
a critical mass of users begin to sign mail by default (and then start
signing each others' keys), the web of trust doesn't have much weight outsi=
de
those involved in it. That is to say, we can't exert much pressure on those
not in the web.
We end up in a situation akin to the much-debated SMTP extensions/rewrite -
good ideas that will likely be impossible to adopt with any success.
> i am not an expert in this field, but i think that a generic standard
> for this kind of trust model is long overdue, the only application
> nowadays out there in the wild using it being pgp's model of the web of
> trust.=20
Oop, there you went and mentioned it directly. I hadn't read that far yet. =
To
my knowledge, the PGP web of trust is the only model of its kind that has
enjoyed even a limited success to date.
> creating such a generally applicable model of introducer trust, starting
> from design over implementation of a portable library that does it all,
> up to plug-in extensions to existing software (like hooking it up to
> SMTP greetings of the major flavours of MTAs, adding it to certain
> protocols, like HTTP, where it could easily replace most HTTP-Basic-Auth
> style systems of most community sites, like adding it to say gnutella's
> protocol, etc.) would solve a whole bunch of problems we all got today.
> with a certain amount of engineering effort, it might be applicable to
> IPSEC, too.
The only problem that really bears consideration is adoption. Until the use=
rs
(in AOL or Microsoft quantities) adopt a thing, it will have little market
power (whether your market is financial or technical). Compared with the
adoption problem, the engineering details are trivial.
> suggestions welcome, tell me what you think, even if you think that it's
> a moronic idea (in any case, the ``why'' is the important point)
Good idea, but very likely impossible to implement effectively. At any rate,
a mailing list for such a thing might not be a bad idea.
> regards,
> /k
--=20
-=3D Scott Francis || darkuncle (at) darkuncle (dot) net =3D-
GPG key CB33CCA7 has been revoked; I am now 5537F527
illum oportet crescere me autem minui
--Il7n/DHsA0sMLmDu
Content-Type: application/pgp-signature
Content-Disposition: inline
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (FreeBSD)
iD8DBQE9ZRxOWaB7jFU39ScRAvZQAJwKOVAcFm2cRM6s1yMs05Gvb358AgCg00u5
zhWraNaZahQfCZ0UfD4x/cU=
=lkwX
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
--Il7n/DHsA0sMLmDu--
