Re: Chain of Trusted Forwarders

At 11:12 PM 5/29/2005 -0400, Robert A. Rosenberg wrote:
> At 12:07 -0400 on 05/29/2005, Valdis(_dot_)Kletnieks(_at_)vt(_dot_)edu wrote:
>
> > Congrats.  You've re-invented the PGP Web Of Trust, although usually people
> > don't bother doing the extra step of running credit and police records.  The
> > fact is that the PGP Public Keyserver system has only several million e-mail
> > addresses in it, and only some 100K (last I checked) in the "well connected
> > set" (meaning keys that *have* done this sort of thing enough to be
> > identifiable to anybody else in the set).
> That number is dropping fast due to the new PGP Key server code that drops 
> any signature from a uploaded key if it is not already on the server. IOW: 
> If A has had his/her key signed by B, C, and D, these signatures will get 
> stripped off when stored on the server unless B, C, and D has uploaded 
> their keys to the Server. To get an accurate key onto the server, A must 
> reload his/her key again after B, C, and D (who must also reupload so the 
> copies signed by the others is the "official" copy that is stored.
The difference between the "chain of trust" you are talking about and email 
authentication is DNS.  When a sender puts its public key, or any other 
authentication information in its own section of the DNS hierarchy, we 
don't need further authentication of that information.  We assume the folks 
who delegate DNS zones, starting with the registrars of the 
top-level-domains, are competent and honest.  ( Yes, I know about Melbourne 
IT's mishandling of panix.com.  The exception proves the rule.  Hopefully, 
Melbourne and a bunch of other registrars have fixed their procedures.)
The security requirements needed to thwart spammers are luckily much less 
than needed to guard nuclear weapons data, or we would not be able to rely 
on DNS.
--
Dave
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