From owner-freebsd-security Wed May 17 10:39:40 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-security@freebsd.org Received: from obie.softweyr.com (obie.softweyr.com [204.68.178.33]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id BF14937B5EB; Wed, 17 May 2000 10:39:24 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from wes@softweyr.com) Received: from softweyr.com (ip43.salt-lake-city6.ut.pub-ip.psi.net [38.27.95.43]) by obie.softweyr.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id LAA13526; Wed, 17 May 2000 11:39:05 -0600 (MDT) (envelope-from wes@softweyr.com) Message-ID: <3922D9A3.9EEC6033@softweyr.com> Date: Wed, 17 May 2000 11:40:51 -0600 From: Wes Peters Reply-To: security@FreeBSD.org Organization: Softweyr LLC X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (X11; U; FreeBSD 4.0-STABLE i386) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Robert Watson Cc: Darren Reed , Peter Wemm , committers@FreeBSD.org, security@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: HEADS UP: New host key for freefall! References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-security@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Robert Watson wrote: > > [previous material elided because we're in violent agreement] > > Now to address Wes's point: I don't believe SSH1 can do certification, > although I don't know about SSH2. Oh, I was referrering to certificates for sending S/MIME email. > At TIS, we have a DNSsec adaptation to > store host keys in DNS securely, but the secure resolver for BIND9 wasn't > done last I checked, meaning that an SSH client cannot automatically > retrieve and verify the host key using DNSsec yet. DNSsec would really be > an ideal way to distribute host keys for SSH, so I'll push on appropriate > parties to see if we can finish it up some time soon (really depends on > the Nominum/ISC folks). We'll await news from you. > I do agree that we need to do a CA, but as I've mentioned before, we need > to do it *right* or not at all. This means a secure key storage > mechanism/facility, offline signing key, etc, etc. Rather than grow our > own, it might be easier (and more affordable) to sit on someone else's, > unless BSDi has one already? Does anyone know anything about > inter-cert-format certification? I.e., can an x.509 PKI root sign PGP > keys in a useful way? Is it usefully verifiable in an automated way? Not that I know of, unless you count sending the PGP keys in an S/MIME message. I suspect that might be adequate for our needs, but will defer to the expertise of our resident crypto-heads. My security expertise runs more towards system configuration and protocol design. > OpenSSL can handle CA behavior, but there are presumably commercial > products that can do a much better job in terms to handling key splitting, > etc. Some comparison shopping and communication I'm not sure we'll be doing a large enough volume to warrant paying money for CA services. I guess we'd have to work out a plan for what classes of persons and/or positions we plan to issue keys/certs to in order to answer that question. If we're talking about a CA cert, a cert for each of the "hats", and a cert for each committer individually, that means right now we'd need to manage about 210 certs, of which 5 or 6 need to be transferrable. Plus, I really like the idea of a cert with "The FreeBSD Project" as the CA. Are we not the most reliable source of information about FreeBSD? Replies directed to -security, as this has grown out of the scope of committers. (And because I don't want Sheldon to yell again. ;^) -- "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?" Wes Peters Softweyr LLC wes@softweyr.com http://softweyr.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-security" in the body of the message