On Tuesday, April 1, 2003, at 05:31 AM, william(_at_)elan(_dot_)net wrote:
There is nothing stopping spammers from generating new keys and
certificates
for their mail servers, so we can have servers exchange certs, but
really
not authentication there as far as who is who.
as a friend of mine who's a computer security expert keeps reminding
me, authentication is not authorization. The fact that someone can get
authenticated doesn't say anything about what that person can (or
should) be able to do. It merely means you have some idea who that
person is supposed to be.
It doesn't matter how good the authentication scheme is if there's no
way to turn that into what a person is authorized to do. That's a key
problem with certs and many authentication schemes. Given how easy it
is to get or generate certs, and given that even if you authenticate
sites and can blacklist certs that spam, if certs are effectively
throwaway tools for spammers, what good does blacklisting a cert do?
authenticating a stranger doesn't buy you anything, because you still
don't know what permissions you can trust that stranger with.
authentication is mostly of advantage for whitelisting operations and
clearing stuff out of the way that you know you don't have to look at,
at least until someone grabs someone else's cert...
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