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------- Forwarded message follows ------- Date sent: Fri, 9 May 2003 00:31:03 -0400 From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> To: politech@politechbot.com Subject: FC: Critique of "TRIPOLI" authenticated email proposal Send reply to: declan@well.com
The below discussion is from cypherpunks. The relevant graf from the TRIPOLI proposal is this: >For Tripoli Pits to be useful resources for e-mail processing and >handling, it is absolutely critical that they be certified by >external, third-party certification entities. Without certification by >trusted third-parties, such an authentication system would be useless >since it could not be trusted to provide accurate and valid >authentication data.
This is not a new breed of proposal. Ideas for certified email have been around for over two decades, if we go back to a 1982 report by O. Goldreich of the computer science department of the Technion, Haifa, Israel. Many IEEE-published papers in the 1990s explored the field (see this bibliography: http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~ateniese/papers/ndss01.pdf), though the primary focus was not on using it as an anti-spam technique.
My view is that it may be an interesting academic problem, but actually implementing and deploying a Trusted Third Party scheme for email runs into a number of practical problems, some of which are described below.
Oh, and here's a Slashdot thread: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=63556&cid=0&pid=0&startat=&thresho ld=1&mode=nested&commentsort=0&op=Change
-Declan
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From: Nomen Nescio <nobody@dizum.com> Date: Fri, 9 May 2003 03:50:02 +0200 (CEST)
Lauren Weinstein, founder of People for Internet Responsibility, has come out with a new spam solution at http://www.pfir.org/tripoli-overview.
According to this proposal, the Internet email architecture would be revamped. Each piece of mail would include a PIT, a Payload Identity Token, emphasis on Identity. This would be a token certifying that you were an Authorized Email User as judged by the authorities. Based on your PIT, the receiving email software could decide to reject your email.
It is anticipated that all Pits considered acceptable by the vast majority of all Tripoli-compliant software user would be digitally signed by one or more designated, trustworthy, third-pary authorities who would be delegated the power to certify the validity of identity and other relevant information within Pits.
In other words, here comes Verisign again.
It is anticipated that in most cases, in order for the sender of an e-mail message to become initially certified by a Pit Certification Authority (PCA), the sender would need to first formally accept Terms of Service (ToS) that may well prohibit the sending of spam, and equally importantly, would authorize the certification authority to "downgrade" the sender's authentication certification in the case of spam or other ToS violations.
Thus you have to be politically acceptable to the Powers That Be in order to receive your license to email, aka your PIT. And be careful what you say or your PIT will be downgraded.
Unfortunately he doesn't discuss various crypto protocol issues:
If the PIT is just a datum, what keeps someone from stealing your PIT and spams with it?
If the PIT is a cert on a key, what do you sign? The message? What if it gets munged in transit, as messages do? You've just lost most of your email reliability.
Or maybe you sign the current date/time? Then delayed mail is dead mail.
Or maybe you respond to a challenge and sign that? That won't work if relays are involved, because they can't sign for you.
Spam is a problem, but it's no excuse to add more centralized administrative control to the Internet. Far better to go with a decentralized solution like camram.sourceforge.net, basically a matter of looking for hashcash in the mail headers. This raises the cost to spammers without significantly impacting normal users.
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Date: Fri, 9 May 2003 03:40:24 +0100 From: Adam Back <adam@cypherspace.org>
Yes, there is some discussion of it on slashdot, including several other people who have commented similarly to anonymous that it is a pretty big privacy invasion and centralised control point problem.
The claim that you can optionally be anonymous and not use a cert, or get an anonymous cert is plainly practically bogus. You'd stand about as much chance of having your mail read as if you shared mail hub with spamford wallace -- ie 90+% of internet mail infrastructure would drop your mail on the floor on the presumption it was spam.
Plus a point I made in that thread is that it is often not in the internet user's interests to non-repudiably sign every message they send just to be able to send mail because that lends amunition to hostile recipients who from time-to-time target internet users for bullshit libel and unauthorised investment advice etc.
Companies also are I would expect somewhat sensitive to not signing everything for similar reasons as those behind their retention policies where they have policies of deleteing emails, files and shredding paper files after some period.
In addition PKIs because of the infrastructure requirements have probem complex to setup and administer. So now we've taken one hard problem (stopping spam) and added another hard problem (hierarchical PKI deployment) and somehow this is supposed to be effective at stopping spam.
In addition unless there is significant financial cost for certificates and/or signifcant and enforceable financial penalty and good identification and registration procedures enforced by the CAs it wouldn't even slow spammers who would just get a cert, spam, get revoked, get another cert and repeat.
Certificate revocation is already a weak point of PKI technology, and to reasonably stop spam before the spammer manages to send too many millions of spams with a cert, you have to revoke the cert PDQ!
And finally it all ends up being no more than an expensive implementation of blacklists (or I suppose more properly whitelists), because the CAs are maintaining lists of people who have not yet been revoked as spammers. Some click through agreement isn't going to stop spammers. Legislation or legal or financial threat is going to stop spammers either because any level of registration time identity verification that is plausibly going to be accepted by users, and this is also limited by the cost -- higher assurance is more cost which users also won't be willing to accept -- will be too easy for the spammers to fake. And email is international and laws are not.
It is pretty much an "internet drivers license" for email.
I also think that fully distributed systems such as hashcash are more suitable for a global internet service. My preferred method for deploying hashcash is as a token exempting it's sender from bayesian filtering, and any other content based or sender based filtering.
That way as an email user you have an incentive to install a hashcash plugin http://www.cypherspace.org/hashcash/ because it will ensure your mail does not get deleted by ever-more aggressive filtering and scattergun blackhole systems. The camram system http://www.camram.org/ is a variant of this.
It also more directly addresses the problem: it makes it more expensive for spammers to send the volumes of mail they need to to break even.
Adam
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