179519 - Easier email security keys using DNSSEC and LDAP

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Security: S/MIME, enhancement)

Description

[David A. Wheeler]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020830
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020830

Currently, it's non-trivial to get keys securely exchanged to get
encryption and authentication - wouldn't it be better if it could done
completely automatically?

The article http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/easy-email-sec.html
describes in detail how to securely get keys for email.
All you need is the email address of a user, and you can automatically
sign, encrypt, decrypt, and authenticate.  It
requires DNSSEC (DNS Security), and LDAP deployed to do this.
However, it doesn't require universal deployment; even just DNSSEC
deployed on the root name servers + a few other sites, and LDAP for
key distribution on critical sites (such as CERT), would be helpful.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[John Unruh]

S/MIME. We're working on getting LDAP cert fetching to work.

Comment 2

[Charles Rosendahl]

You're build is older, but should have ldap cert retrieval working.  If not,
please upgrade to the latest 1.2 build.  We have tested this feature to work
with both SSL and non-SSL LDAP servers.  Configure your address book to use your
directory server and cert retrieval will work automatically.

Comment 3

[David A. Wheeler]

But that will only work if the local LDAP server actually has all
the certificates and/or CAs configured for the recipients, correct?
That has a scaling problem - it means that I have to constantly
reconfigure my LDAP server for the certificates of everyone
I communicate with, even if I haven't communicated with them before.

What I'm looking for is an automatic checked-for-security trace,
through DNSSEC, to find the _REMOTE_ CA and _automatically_ get
the other parties' certificates.
That way, once someone has configured their DNS server, I can
immediately find all other certificates exported by all other
organizations without re-configuring their local LDAP servers.
Note that this means that an LDAP server has to be configured to
export the certificates of its local workforce
(e.g., ldap.mega.com  has to export the certificate of
[e-mail]), and then everyone can follow the DNSSEC
trace to ensure that they really got the value stored at
ldap.mega.com.

This is, to my knowledge, NOT supported by current standards,
though of course I could be wrong about that.

Comment 4

[Charles Rosendahl]

reopening and leaving as an enhancement request.

Comment 5

[John G. Myers]

Mass reassign ssaux bugs to nobody