Full Disclosure: Re: [GOATSE SECURITY] Clench: Goatse's way to say "screw you" to certificate authorities

[dvs () hushmail com]

Andrew,

The whole point of the current PKI is to ensure that with no prior 
knowledge on the first connection the person you are communicating 
with is who they say they are via a trusted third party who can 
vouch for them.

If you can verify their identity once you can cache their 
cryptographic identity and use it for further communication since 
you can derive a shared secret based off of that.

In your model that shared secret is the passphrase which you still 
need to somehow transmit to the person you are communicating with.

Unfortunately in your design you have no way to establish a secure 
channel to transmit this secret besides through out of band means 
which boils your entire solution down to nothing more than a 
simplistic symmetric cypher.  

This is no different then installing a client cert or calling your 
target and telling them the AES key for use in future transactions 
over the phone before opening up a socket.


Trying to not sound like a dick,
dvs.



On Wed, 08 Sep 2010 11:26:53 -0700 Harry Strongburg 
<harry.fd () harry lu> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 08, 2010 at 07:15:35PM +0200, Christian Sciberras 
> wrote:
> > You're expecting us to trust YOU over the Government X?
> >
> > How do we know you're not working for the French Government 
> (seeing
> > how you didn't list it in your conspiracy list)?
> >
> > I love jokes, but this is a bit too late for April's Fool.
> It's an open protocol that's being created. Pick it apart if you 
> really 
> have doubts on any possible backdoors. I am not defending the 
> project 
> that's been made so far, as I haven't has much time to read it..., 
> but 
> from a first glance it looks pretty secure.
>
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