Subject: RE: Global PKI on DNS?

From: Mike Burns <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Jun 2002 08:39:12 -0700

There appears to be two main points of contention about PKI on DNS.  Using
the dollar analogy

1. Uniqueness
	How does Jon know that the dollar Jon received from Mike is a
dollar?

	A dollar has specifications that tell you it's a dollar (type of
paper, ink, micro printing, etc)

	Each dollar has a unique serial number. If you find two dollars with
the same serial number, then you know that one of them is not a real dollar.
They key is in the storage of that information.  There must be a place(s)
(Federal Reserve) where there is a record of who the dollar was issued to.

2. Ownership
	How does Jon know that the dollar he received from Mike was Mike's?

	Uniqueness by itself does not imply ownership.

>From: Einar Stefferud [mailto:[email-masked]]
>Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 2002 7:45 PM
>To: ietf
>Subject: Re: Global PKI on DNS?
>
>None of this, whether the dollar was stolen or not, has any impact on
>the trustworthiness of the original dollar, as it is a bearer note,
>and a dollar stolen is a dollar earned in some quarters.
>
>Just like car manufacturers consider a car stolen to be a car sold,
>unless it was stolen from the manufacturer.
>
>We trust the intrinsic appearance of the dollar bill.
>
>Or the pink slip for car ownership, but do not trust the car without
>its pink slip.
>
>Now, if I give you a check, and you give my check, made out to you,
>endorsed to someone else, the recipient, if she accepts it is relying
>on the transitivity of trust, whether such reliance is reliably
>transitive or not.  Most people in the US will not accept such
>checks, but in some countries, such checks circulate for a long time
>and some are never cashed.
>
>The real underlying issue here is reliance, and as Ed has pointed
>out, reliance depends on more than the bearer saying "Trust Me!"
>which is a single channel of communication.  In the case of a dollar,
>it depends on the perceived ability to find a greater fool to accept
>it at face value,
>as in the act of buying or selling common stock shares.
>
>This is why "Trust Me!" is generally considered a joke and why most
>people laugh at it, whether they understand the formal logic of the
>humor or not.
>
>But it is clear that trust is not some simple property of objects!
>It is much more complex and depends on subjective evaluations of its
>value, gennerally incorporating many bits of information from
>multiple channels.
>
>Cheers...\Stef
>

---

From: Einar Stefferud <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Jun 2002 12:27:17 -0700

Of course!    Hi Mike;-)...

Trust is multi-faceted.
Trust in the dollar bill is independent of trust in the source.
Except when they are nice new crisp bills, when it is preferred
to get them directly from a trusted bank or other reputable business,
rather than from a street peddler.  Or get them as a Birthday present 
from a trusted relative.

If the dollar is a poor enough counterfeit it is easily detected as 
such, but if it is a perfect fake, it will never be detected by 
anyone until it is retired, if then, and no one will be harmed except 
the Govt when it redeems it, where it will just be a round-off 
error;-)...

So, we all manage to avoid significant losses with dollar bills,
because we trust some or all that I said above to be true.

That is quite a lot of multi-channelled qualified information!
It collectively includes long histories of many people dealing with 
dollar bills;-)...  And, little experience with fraudulent dollar 
bills.

Who is to say (and prove) that they have absolutely never received 
and passed along a counterfeit dollar bill?

So, among other things, the dollar bill scenario has little or 
nothing to do with the discussion of trust tools and systems in the 
internet environment, except to notice the multi-channel nature of 
our trust in dollar bills.

I note also that there are no shared secrets, or crypto keys involved 
in the general public trust of dollar bills.

Cheers...\Stef

At 8:39 AM -0700 6/25/02, Mike Burns wrote:
>There appears to be two main points of contention about PKI on DNS. 
>Using the dollar analogy
>
>1. Uniqueness
>         How does Jon know that the dollar Jon received from Mike is a dollar?
>        
>         A dollar has specifications that tell you it's a dollar 
>(type of paper, ink, micro printing, etc)
>
>         Each dollar has a unique serial number. If you find two 
>dollars with the same serial number, then you know that one of them 
>is not a real dollar.  They key is in the storage of that 
>information.  There must be a place(s) (Federal Reserve) where there 
>is a record of who the dollar was issued to.
>
>2. Ownership
>  >From: Einar Stefferud [<mailto:[email-masked]>mailto:[email-masked]]

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Jun 2002 15:50:25 -0400

I don't think the dollar analogy is very useful.  The kind of trust
we place in money is a very specific kind of trust, and the risk
we take in trusting money is generally limited to the denomination
of the note or coin.  This is so well-understood that most of us
never think about it - though we may realize it's prudent to 
examine a $100 bill more closely than we would a $1 bill before 
accepting it as valid.

OTOH, the appropriate kind and degree of trust to place in a 
domain name or CA for a domain name is not well-understood, 
even though it may be implicit.

Keith

---

From: Lloyd Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Jun 2002 23:05:47 +0100 (BST)

On Tue, 25 Jun 2002, Keith Moore wrote:

> of the note or coin.

Inflation shows how much nobody trusts money. It's a trust that
withers away over time.

L.

<http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/><[email-masked]>

---

From: Einar Stefferud <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Jun 2002 17:59:10 -0700

That is not trust that you see withering away.

It is called value;-)...\Stef