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Re: PGP kerserver infrastructure

  • From: Michael Hallgren
  • Date: Tue Jun 27 16:49:05 2000

"Roeland Meyer (E-mail)" wrote:

> > L. Sassaman: Tuesday, June 27, 2000 12:43 PM
>
> > There are many issues too detailed to go into here that should
> be
> > formally addressed in regards to keyservers. If the keyserver
> > infrastructure does ramp up, I think that an RFC will be in
> > order. Anyone
> > with the IETF here? Who would I talk to about forming such a
> WG? Is a
> > keyserver standard within the scope of the IETF?
>
> I get a real good chuckle out of this thread.<g>
> 1) Randy hisself is a promenent member of the IETF.
> 2) Having co-chaired a WG, I suspect that randy may even know how
> it's done.
> 3) I'd bet a small amount of change that Randy has already
> started the wheels in motion, even before he sent the first
> message.
> 4) I suspect that this thread exists to measure the level of
> interest among the major players.
>
> Now for something on-topic;
> Yes, Internet PKI, in it's present state, sucks. Yes, there is a
> need, but the architecture definitely needs a look-see.
> Personally, I think it grossly inadequate and there ain't no way
> that it can be made as reliable as DNS, in it's present form.
> It's basically a poor-man's TLS with about half the fore-thought.
> Personally, I've been working with X.509 certs as an improvement
> over basic PGP, but again, the PKI sucks there as well.
>
> But, as a previous poster already brought to surface, the users
> must have an interest in this service or NONE of the ISPs will be
> interested in deployment. The reason that existing PKI sucks is
> mainly a lack of serious user interest. There are NO
> production-level PKI servers out there today. None of them will
> commit to an SLA and there are too few customers that will pay
> the required bucks to support a decent SLA, for a PKI
> infrastructure. Build it and they will NOT come, yet.

Yes, but they're likely to come... soon... ([likely/perhaps] not
[immediately] with the Net wide request though, but in quite various
quite relevant contexts).

>
>
> As usual, this is only an opinion
>

Mine :)

mh


>
> ---
> R O E L A N D  M .  J .  M E Y E R
> CEO, Morgan Hill Software Company, Inc.
> An eCommerce and eBusiness practice
> providing products and services for the Internet.
> Tel: (925)373-3954
> Fax: (925)373-9781

--
Michael Hallgren, http://m.hallgren.free.fr