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Let's Kerberos


(07 Apr 2024) (I think this is worth pondering, but I don’t mean it too seriously—don’t panic.) Are the sizes of post-quantum signatures getting you down? Are you despairing of deploying a post-quantum Web PKI? Don’t fret! Symmetric cryptography is post-quantum too! When you connect to a site, also fetch a record from DNS that contains a handful of “CA” records. Each contains: - a UUID that identifies a CA - ECA-key(server-CA-key, AAD=server-hostname) - A key ID so that the CA can find “CA-key” from the previous field.

While we have Certificate Transparency today, that’s a post-hoc auditing mechanism and a single CA compromise is still a problem in the current WebPKI. The CAs can be required to publish a log of server key IDs that they recognise for each hostname. The high-availability part of CA processing is designed to be nearly stateless so should scale very well and be reasonably robust using anycast addresses.

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