spf-discuss
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Re: patents, trusting CAs, etc.

2003-12-08 12:22:05
Hello, I was going to wait a while longer before introducing myself onto this list; but I can't contain myself...

I do not think we want PKI anywhere near a spam solution. Several reasons:

* More than 224,000 open relays (ordb.org) I assume some if not most are due to careless administrators, and these same careless administrators are going to correctly use certificates?

* There is very little incentive to steal keys right now. Client certificates are generally useless, server certificates are only good if you can control the domain name as well. Correct me if I'm wrong, but even if I have www.vendor.com's private key, I still can't snoop in on SSL conversations, and I can't hijack the site unless I hijack the DNS entry as well. Look at the tremendous lengths spammers have gone through to make e-mail unusable: deter spam using PKI and I suspect we'll see a healthy black market of sender certificates.

The basic point is, trust DNS. If the key fingerprints are to be put into DNS, then we trust DNS anyway, and we can eschew the PKI.

Thanks!

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