Subject: [anonsec] Proposal: we specify how to do both self-signed certs and universal non-secret

From: paul.hoffman at vpnc.org (Paul Hoffman / VPNC)
Date: Mon Nov 22 15:52:39 2004

Hi again. As I said in my previous message, I see the problem that 
self-signed certs solve, and I agree that it is real. It will be 
rare, but it is real.

However, I think that hitching our horse to just self-signed certs is 
guaranteed to get us fewer implementations than we would want because 
many IPsec stacks don't even have cert handling in them, and those 
that do rarely interoperate. Getting the universal non-secret 
authentication (bound to the upper layer with the DH publics) will be 
*much* easier to get implemented.

So my proposal is that we specify both, with the universal non-secret 
as a MUST (for greatest interop) and the self-signed certs as a 
SHOULD (because of the rekeying problem). We tightly scope both of 
them, and each has its own VendorID that comes in message 1 and 2 so 
the other party knows what to do when it gets to authentication time. 
The tight scoping and early warning on self-signed certs would allow 
the receiver's code to use a completely different path for processing 
than the normal cert path, thus avoiding all of the PKI4IPSEC kruft.

Thoughts?

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium