Re: Draft Charter

[Paul Hoffman <paul.hoffman@xxxxxxxx>]

At 4:41 PM -0400 8/10/07, Stephen Kent wrote:
> At 1:21 PM -0700 8/10/07, Paul Hoffman wrote:
> > ... the TAA.
> >
> > > - Supporting multiple trust anchor administrators, such as is 
> > > typical for home
> > >   users
> > >
> > > Why do we believe it is common for a home user to need multiple TA 
> > > administrators?
> >
> > I would be happy if we swapped "individual" for "home". If needed, 
> > we can add text such as "For example, they may want their employers 
> > and their banks to act as trust anchor administrators."
>
> Ah, I see your point. If I can appropriately constrain the impact of 
> what a TAA can do, I can safely let others be TAAs for my machine. 
> That seems right for my home machine, but for a company-owned 
> machine the roles probably are reversed, i.e., the employer is in 
> charge and will allow the employee limited control over TAs.

Exactly right. From the TAA's point of view, there are two choices: 
"I control everything in his store" and "I share control of his store 
with unknown others". We don't have to choose the second way, but I 
think the overhead of doing so is worth the benefit of many more 
potential use cases.

> > > - Supporting devices with limited or no user interface that may or 
> > > may not have connectivity to the Internet
> > >
> > > a simple typo fix, but if a deliverable is a TA management 
> > > protocol, then why do we worry about devices that have no Internet 
> > > connectivity?
> >
> > Protocols do not require Internet connectivity. End-to-end email is 
> > a good example of that.
>
> Good point.  We may want to define protocols that can use staged 
> delivery, even if there is no network involved.  If that's the 
> intent, the bullet could be a bit clearer, e.g., if we want to 
> define protocols that work even if we deliver messages via a USB 
> token from a source to a destination. However, I note that a 
> protocol of that sort is likely to be more complex than one that 
> assumes use of lower layer network protocols, even staged delivery 
> ones.

Fully disagree. We can decouple the format from how one hands the 
object to the next party. This is akin to defining CMS separate from 
S/MIME.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium