potential new IETF WG on anonymous IPSec

[Thomas Shaddack]

On Thu, 16 Sep 2004, Major Variola (ret) wrote:

> At 02:17 PM 9/16/04 -0700, Joe Touch wrote:
> >Except that certs need to be signed by authorities that are trusted.
> 
> Name one.

You don't have to sign the certs. Use self-signed ones, then publish a GPG 
signature of your certificate in a known place; make bloody sure your GPG 
key is firmly embedded in the web-of-trust.

This can be done with certs signed by an untrusted (read: any other than 
the one you operate yourself) CA as well.

For HTTPS, there can be a negotiated standard location and format of the 
certificate signature file, stored in eg. /gpgsigned.xml location; the 
certificate is transported during the SSL handshake, so you can validate 
it within a single HTTPS request for the file.

Similar thing applies for the client certificates and the servers; but 
then the server has to request the certificate signature from somewhere 
else (the location may be specified as an URL in the comment field of the 
client certificate). This should be easy to implement with PHP scripts, if 
Apache is configured to make the certificate visible as an environmental 
variable.