Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: key trust

[Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker]

In message <address@hidden> on Wed, 12 Oct 2005 20:18:21 +0100, Bruce Stephens 
<address@hidden> said:

monotone> Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker <address@hidden> writes:
monotone> 
monotone> [...]
monotone> 
monotone> > Yes, self-signed certificates would provide exactly the
monotone> > same capabilities as today's key system does.  This is
monotone> > what OpenCM did (does?), and I questioned that kind of use
monotone> > with that group, and I will here as well.  Basically, it
monotone> > provides nothing more than bloat around the keys.  If
monotone> > you're going to use X.509, do it for real.
monotone> 
monotone> I think OpenCM can probably be considered as dead.  Like
monotone> Stellation.  Shame, because both seemed to me to have
monotone> interesting approaches to things.

Yeah, although, when I got my fingers dirty with OpenCM, it didn't
take me too long to realise that it would probably not become more
than a platform for others to take the next step from.  I can't say
what exactly made me think so, it's a matter of intuition.

monotone> By doing X.509 "for real", are you thinking of the full
monotone> flexibility described in the recently published RFC 4158?

No, I was thinking of making good use of things like policy attributes
at assign roles or rights to a certificate holder.  But sure, if you
want, there's always the possibility of coupling the whole thing with
a replicated LDAP repository and do the math with it :-).

But you'll have to wait until that RFC is implemented in OpenSSL :-).

monotone> I'm not saying that would be impossible---I believe the
monotone> freely available CML software (part of SMP) will do all
monotone> that, with knobs on.

I'll have to check that out.  Last time I looked at BAE Software, they
hadn't come that far...

monotone> Maybe that's a good argument against doing it: stop
monotone> complaining doesn't use X.509, or we'll *really* do X.509,
monotone> and then you'll be sorry.

Hehehe

Cheers,
Richard

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Richard Levitte                         address@hidden
                                        http://richard.levitte.org/

"When I became a man I put away childish things, including
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