RL "Bob" Morgan, UW: In the demo, you generated a public/private key pair -- it seemed really fast.
Peter: OpenSSL 512-bit key pair generation on P233 is fast.
Bob: The browser expects to protect private keys with a password. Is there really no reason to do that in this case?
Peter: That's our view -- we're trying to get rid of passwords.
Bob: Is there still some UI there when private keys are accessed and used? Do you get asked for a password or have to supply zero-length password?
Bill Doster, UM: With IE, if a site wants to authenticate you, you get a dialog asking which certificate to use (even if you only have one cert). However, Navigator doesn't do this. And if there's no password, you're not asked for one.
Russ Allbery, SU: How do you log out? In a cluster environment, things get tricky ...
Bill: It's the same sort of problem we have with Kerberos tickets. NT gives you control at logout, so you can do this; it's harder with Win9x. CAPI has an interface for deleting certs.
Naomaru Itoi, UM: Is it possible to use two keys for authentication and encryption?
Peter: We're really not trying to do digital signatures or public key encryption, just short-term authentication for access control.
Mark Poepping, CMU: When people are using real keys in conjunction with junk keys, how do you avoid bad interoperations?
Peter: I don't believe that people will be using real keys -- the vendors are hung up on mathematically model social processes; it will never happen. All this PK stuff is bullshit, IMHO, but it is The Way for web space access control; we're stuck with it.
Russ: We use cookies to bootstrap Kerberos authentication. I don't know if you can give cookies to a browser from an external app ...
Peter: How does it work?
Russ: When you connect to a web page, the server does an S/Ident callback, makes a cookie and feeds it back.
Peter: What is S/Ident?
Russ: S/Ident is basically the same as Sidecar -- our Kerberos infrastructure spawns a background process on the client that listens on the ident port. If S/Ident is not installed, we fall back to a secondary server that does stuff by SSL. This is ugly, but you can't assume everyone has necessary client-side software.
Peter: Note that in the space of {Netscape, IE} X {Windows, Mac}, we only have one box checked.
Bob: You need a module on the server and client for this to be "clean." You have to hack htaccess into server;
Russ: ... And once you've done that, you can do anything
Laurie Collinsworth, CU: At Cornell, we use our permit server. A module on the web server does a callback to Sidecar, which then calls permit server.
Mark: How many identities (and thus requirements for authentication) do you think people will have?
Peter: My opinion: one per enterprise
Mark: So how many times will you have to authenticate?
Peter: Most of my work is within UMich realm (so a small handful). Observe how industry has gone on this -- every e-commerce outfit forces you to authenticate privately. (Insert cockroach metaphor here.)
Russ: You really want an interface where a remote site can send a cert to your browser that you can reuse.