After retiring I mostly pursued my interests in peak oil and in computer network security. While at CSIRO I had published an Internet Draft on "Basic Internet Security Model". It is still online at http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-smart-sec-model-00, though it expired long ago. Later I tried to build on that to create a secure Internet, in what I called the Key2key Project.
After the recent security issues on the Internet (brought to light by Snowden) I thought I should look into reviving it. However it doesn't seem like something where I am likely to make any headway, given the cool/hostile reaction to my `99 Internet Draft years ago. Anyway, for the record, here is the last, rather dated and very incomplete, key2key overview doc:
The Key2key Project
The end2end interest group created the ideas on scalability that led to the Internet. The aim of the key2key project is to extend this philosophical framework into the security area to create a secure overlay network.
A trusted system is one that can harm the truster. It may actually do harm if it fails in some way, or if the trust that was placed in it was misplaced.
Security is when you know which systems you trust, and explicitly agree to place that trust. We don't consider whether that is because the trusted systems are actually believed to be trustworthy, or just that the alternatives are believed to be worse. Food security is when you get to balance the risk that the food is poison against the risk of starvation. Food insecurity is when you are force fed.
In the Internet today, security is not end-to-end. That is why Internet users are trusting intermediate hardware and software systems that they don't know exist.
This document covers the following areas:
Modelling Internet entities and sub-entities. This is a necessary step to understanding the problem.
Modelling cryptographic security technology: hashes, encryption, verification, signatures.
Modelling communication between entities. This will make it possible to define when a protocol is secure, and define a framework for building secure protocols. These secure protocols will be necessary for building our secure overlay network.
Modelling the common and crucial situation when one entity executes software "on behalf of" another (OBO).
A device for human signatures (DHS), and the implications of its limitations.
Delegating specified limited powers to sub-entities.
Securely booting a PC and setting it up as a sub-entity capable of representing the user on the network, and referring matters beyond its delegation up to the DHS.
A protocol for communication by "on behalf of" execution. It is intended to show eventually, but not in this document, that this is the only reasonable approach to this problem.
A simplistic e-commerce application will illustrate in detail how these components work together to make a secure system.
Entities and sub-entities
Distributed computing is very different when the computers involved are under the control of a single entity, compared with the case where the computers are controlled by separate entities. For the former the important issue is performance. The key2key project is all about the latter, communication between separate entities. In this case the main issue is security [footnote: However key2key can have good performance. Though the main control communication in key2key is often forced to follow potentially low performance routes, bulk data transfer is direct].
Legal entities (people and organizations) have sub-entities, such as employees and computer systems, which are not legal entities themselves, but can be given a delegation to act on behalf of the legal entity. Legal entities are not connected directly to the network. So in order to perform actions on the Internet they need to have some way to give a delegation to a computer system to act on their behalf. This can be quite informal, and the legal implications of the mechanism chosen will rarely be tested in court. In this document we will discuss well defined mechanisms which are appropriate as the basis for more serious interaction between legal entities via the network.
We want to get the communication between separate legal entities via the network onto a sound logical footing. It is important to understand that an individual acting with delegation as an employee is, for our purposes, entirely different from that individual acting as themselves. The fact that these two (sub)entities share the same brain gives rise to serious security issues. However this problem predates computing and networking. We aren't going to attempt to solve it, though it is useful to consider how well traditional legal approaches carry over into the network world.
Cryptographic technology
The key2key project relies on certain capabilities that are usually provided by cryptographic technologies, but can sometimes be provided in a simpler way by a trusted third party:
Secure hash (cryptographic checksum). This is a small fixed sized number, typically 256 bits, which uniquely determines some larger bit string. In key2key: end points are represented by the secure hash of a public key; immutable files are represented by the secure hash of the contents. The required characteristic is that there is vanishing probability that two bit strings will give the same hash; and it is computationally infeasible, if given a bit string to find a different bit string that hashes to the same result. This capability could be provided by a trusted 3rd party that remembered bit strings and returned a sequence number.
Encryption in key2key applications is used for access control of information that has to go via a 3rd party. Of course this often includes providers of network services. It is commonly the case that, if data is not completely public domain, it is easier to encrypt it than evaluate whether the 3rd parties who will see it are entitled to. Note that the important public keys in key2key are not used for encryption, only for signature verification. Encryption public keys are always separate and usually temporary.
The bulk of communication between key2key end points is verified by a temporary agreed shared key (whether or not the communication is encrypted). This means that each party knows the communication came from the other but doesn't allow them to prove that to a 3rd party.
Digital signing and verification is only used during the setup phase of communication, and for communications that the recipient wants to be able to prove to a 3rd party that they received. If clever algorithms based on sophisticated mathematics were to cease to be secure then a system using shared keys via a trusted third party would also be possible. Important long term public keys can use combined algorithms, and/or use multiple keys where the matching private keys are not held in one place.
Communication in key2key is between end-points identified by the hash of a public key. The first thing sent between the parties is the public key itself, which must hash to the identifying hash to be accepted. After that other cryptographic services and keys can be agreed between the end points.
Logical communication model
Each end-point is under the control of a legal entity (or in rare cases multiple entities, in some and-or tree structure [footnote: In the 'and' case all communication goes to each of the entities, and anything coming from it is approved by all. In the 'or' case communication goes to an unknown one of the entities and anything coming from it is approved by one of them.]). Initially the end points don't, by default, know what entity controls the other end. Often the initiating party will use a temporary public key just for that connection, and there may never be any call for the initiator to reveal who they are.
Two machines acting under common control might just move data back and forth according to some distributed computing algorithm that the owner has chosen to use. Communication between separate legal entities can only take place if it is meaningful. The agreed protocol must be able to be interpreted as a sequence of assertions and requests, in order for it to be possible to check if the protocol securely protects the interests of each party.
If end point 1 (EP1) sends the assertion "the sky is blue", then the receiving end can only infer and record the fact that "EP1 asserts that the sky is blue". Each end point keeps a store of beliefs and of business logic. When a request comes in, then the end point will effectively try to construct a proof that the request should be honoured.
End points can also send "out of band" hints to the other end. The correctness or otherwise of hints doesn't affect the trust in the main communication. One sort of hint will be about how to contact 3rd party keys mentioned in the communication. This might save a lookup in a directory, or it might actually be the only way for the recipient to get that information. Another sort of hint will be proposed proofs for the recipient. This is desirable because constructing proofs is inherently undecidable and the receiver of the request might be unwilling to invest the resources, and it might be more fair for the requester to do the work. This sort of hint might look something like this in English translation "Assuming your belief store holds 'trust bank public key about assertions of the form ...' and '...' then follow these steps ...".
Communication is between sub (or subsub) entities. Before events with real world significance (such as purchases) can take place, assertions about delegation may need to be exchanged, with a chain leading up to a key that is provably the key of the legal entity. However exchanges of real world significance can be anonymous on one or both sides, as in the real world when we go into a shop and pay cash.
"On Behalf Of" execution
We are familiar with the situation where we visit a web site like google or facebook or a poker server or an airline reservation site, and we perform actions which are carried out on our behalf on a computer that is not under our control. We might have an explicit or implicit legal contract, which might constrain how honestly or correctly the actions are carried out. But in general we have to assume that the requests we make will be handled in a way that suits the owner, not us, as we saw in the case of the cheating owner of a poker service, and in the case (some time ago) of a search for "linux" on MSN-India's search service, which returned linuxsucks.com as the first hit.
Other OBO cases we have a stronger expectation that the owner of the environment will honestly carry out the user's requests: when the owner provides a web hosting service, or a unix login service, or a container for isolated execution, or a virtual machine that the user seems to completely control.
Still in all these cases it hardly seems wise for the user of the service to transfer, to that environment, credentials which have power over significant amounts of money or other valuable property. Rather than trying to work out what credentials can be transferred and when, the key2key project takes an alternative approach: credentials are never transferred, but access to external resources is still possible from the OBO execution in exactly the circumstances where this is secure. More on this later.
Device for Human Signatures
We want to make it possible for real world legal entities to interact via the network. What is needed is a way to link people to the network in a way that makes legal sense. The proposed solution will work for an individual representing themself, or for an employee with some delegated ability to act for the employer. We don't consider the possibility of combining these in a single physical device.
The solution is a Device for Human Signature, DHS. The DHS requirements mean that it must be a separate device, not part of a more complex device. The proposed device has the following characteristics:
It has biometric authentication which is unchangeably linked to the owner.
It has a private key that is generated when first activated. Only the public key ever leaves the device.
It has a black and white screen and a mechanism for scrolling the image left-right and up-down.
It has a way that the owner can agree to sign what is displayed on the screen. This is such that it can't be done accidentally, nor can it be done without simultaneous biometric authentication.
There is another mechanism to clear the current image without signing it.
The device is connected to the world by wireless mechanisms and/or cable. If a cable is plugged in then it only uses that, which is desirable for signing things that have privacy restrictions. Either way it displays any offered image and, if signed, it sends the signature back on the reverse route.
The user signs the extended black and white image. She is not able to sign it till she has used the scroll control to view all of it.
The image will always be created, by a defined and public process, from information in a computer friendly format (such as XML). For example one of the known processes will be "English". The information in computer format, and the well know translation process will be sent with the signature of the text when it is used for internal computer purposes. For legal purposes only the actual visible text applies.
Any computer software can "understand" the signed text by using the conversion process on the computer friendly variant and checking that the resultant image is the one that the user signed. E.g. the user might sign "pay $1000 from my account 061234567 to Example Company (ABN 1234) account 0698765". What they actually sign is an array of black and white dots which has the appearance of this sentence. However the receiving computer (presumably the bank) doesn't have to understand the visual dots because such signed documents always come with an accompanying computer friendly structure which converts to the image in a well defined mechanical way. The signed document comes with an accompanying solution to the problem of determining its meaning.
It is important to sign a picture rather than "text", because it removes questions about how the text was rendered, and as we see it works just as well.
The signing device is only intended to be used for important things, or to create a temporary delegation to some more practical computer system which will sign as needed to act on the network within that delegation.
Delegating to sub-entities
For organizations delegating to employees or commercial network servers this is particularly important, and might be quite complicated, specifying what assertions and requests the delegate can make on behalf of the organization and what requests it will honour. This may not be practical for a person delegating to a computer system using the DHS: all the rules would have to be translated into English and read.
The form of delegation which will be initially implemented in key2key is a system of well known named delegation types. In particular the user will probably give his desktop system the "Standard Anonymous Desktop" delegation, which will enable the user to work anonymously on the network as we ordinarily do most of the time. When things come up so that the desktop system needs extra delegation, that will come up as a specific delegation request on the user's DHS.
Architecture of key2key end-point computers
The DHS doesn't remove the need for end-point systems, particularly desktop systems, to be secure. The standard techniques of managed code and sandboxing are crucial to allow applications to run without the need for them to be trusted with the crown jewels: the ability to use the private key to sign assertions and requests.
The traditional file system model of files that can be updated in place is inappropriate for the needs of key2key. Instead files are read only and identified by their hash, so that they are to a large extent self-verifying. The traditional unix updateable file is actually a form of simple database, and is handled in that way with appropriate security mechanisms shared with other network accessible databases.
This will also cover the secure execution of code that is only partly trusted, and of code that is executed on behalf of an external entity.
Desktop system: booting and running
To do anything useful, a user needs to book a desktop system. That system needs to be physically secure, and it should be booted from reliable read only media to place it in a predictable state. That system needs to generate a private and public key pair to allow it to operate on the network using key2key mechanisms.
When that is all done, the next problem is to use the DHS to associate the desktop with the user and appropriate delegation. The desktop will generate an appropriate message, sometimes incorporating user input to adjust the delegation (though normally additional delegation is added later). That message will appear on the desktop's screen, and be transferred to the DHS by wire or wireless mechanism. The DHS will offer that to the user to sign. It will be in the user's own language and will say something like: "I have securely booted on trusted hardware, and the key signature of that system is 123456789ABCEDEF. It is delegated to act for me on all services not requiring specific delegation.". This signed result will be returned to the desktop system and sent as an assertion wherever needed.
OBO execution model
Suppose that user X is running a shell on a remote computer owned and managed by Y, and a program tries to access a resource on a system owned by Z that X is allowed to access. The traditional approach is that X does something which reveal the credentials for accessing Z in a way that Y could easily take advantage of. X might type a password into the interactive session on Y, or might have transferred some cryptographic credentials, such as a a kerberos TGT or a private key to Y. This is wrong.
The key2key approach is that the request from Y's system to Z's system must use Y's credentials. Y will normally tell Z that this is on behalf of X, but this will only be used by Z to reduce its willingness to agree to the request. If Z won't execute the request using Y's credentials then Y can seek an alternative to make that request, and the natural and default alternative is to go back up the chain leading to the OBO execution. So in this simple case, Y will ask X to send the request to Z with X's credentials. And, of course, X is well placed to know if this is a request that naturally springs from the OBO execution on Y. If the execution of the request involves a bulk file transfer than that will go between Y and Z directly, and not be forced to go via X.
Illustrative e-commerce application
Payment by Reservation (PbR) is the key2key native e-commerce application. It associates accounts with keys. It handles need-to-know revelation of information about the end points: i.e. typically only when there is a conflict.
