At the Nexus of Cybersecurity and Public Policy: Some Basic Concepts and Issues by David Clark

Author:David Clark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: The National Academies Press
Published: 2014-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

Given the role of the CA, its compromise is a dangerous event that can undermine transactions based on assurances of identity. Indeed, certificate authorities have in the past been tricked into issuing bad certificates, and some have even gone rogue on their own. The security of the Internet is under stress today in part because the number of trusted but not trustworthy CAs is growing. Thus, CAs must do what they can to ensure that the certificates for which they are responsible are not compromised and, just as important, must be able to revoke a certificate if and when it is compromised.

Of course, certificate revocation is only half the battle when a certificate is compromised—users relying on a certificate should, in principle, check its status to see if it has been revoked. Few users are so diligent—they rely on software to perform such checks. Sometimes the software fails to perform a check, leaving the user with a false sense of security. And sometimes the software informs the user that the certificate has been revoked and asks the user if he or she wants to proceed. Faced with this question, the user often proceeds.

Furthermore, there is an inherent tension between authentication and privacy, because the act of authentication involves some disclosure and confirmation of personal information. Establishing an identifier or attribute for use within an authentication system, creating transactional records, and revealing information used in authentication to others with unrelated interests all have implications for privacy and other civil liberties.

Stronger Authentication for the Internet

As discussed in Chapter 2, digital information is inherently anonymous, which means that specific mechanisms must be in place to associate a given party with any given piece of information. The Internet is a means for transporting information from one computer to another, but today’s Internet protocols do not require a validated identity to be associated with the packets that are sent.

Nevertheless, nearly all users of the Internet obtain service through an Internet service provider, and the ISP usually does have—for billing purposes—information about the party sending or receiving any given packet. In other words, access to the Internet usually requires some kind of authentication of identity, but the architecture of the Internet does not require that identity to be carried with sent packets all the way to the intended recipient. (As an important aside, an ISP knows only who pays a bill for Internet service, and one bill may well cover Internet access for multiple users. However, the paying entity may itself have accounting systems in place to differentiate among these multiple users.)

In the name of greater security, proposals have been made for a “strongly authenticated” Internet as a solution to the problem of attribution. Recall that attribution refers to the identification of the entity responsible for a cyber incident. If cyber incidents effectuated through the Internet could be associated with an identifiable entity, accountability could be established and penalties meted out for illegal, improper, or unauthorized actions. “Strong” authentication mechanisms are one way to improve attribution capabilities.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.