RE: [fw-wiz] Transitive Trust: 40 million credit cards hack'd

From: Bill Royds (broyds_at_rogers.com)
Date: 06/19/05

  • Next message: Marcus J. Ranum: "RE: [fw-wiz] Transitive Trust: 40 million credit cards hack'd" 
    To: "'George Capehart'" <capegeo@opengroup.org>
Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 19:46:07 -0400

    The problem is that people have never truly analysed trust in a systematic
    mathematical way.
    Trust is assumed to be a transitive property when it obviously is not. If Alice
    Trusts Bob and Bob trusts Charles it is not true that Alice should or would
    trust Charles. Trust is not even transitive. We seem to see it as a simple
    relationship when it is not even well understood at all. There has recently been
    some theoretical work on trust algebras (see
    http://security.polito.it/cms2003/Program/Roessler13/1Roessler.pdf or
    http://security.dstc.edu.au/staff/ajosang/papers/algcert.pdf for example) but
    little of it has filtered into actual practice. Yet we are building whole
    financial edifices on completely flawed understanding of how to use distributed
    trust. We need to at least develop some systems that do it right so developers
    have some way of learning how to create viable systems that can have distributed
    security.

    -----Original Message-----
    From: firewall-wizards-admin@honor.icsalabs.com
    [mailto:firewall-wizards-admin@honor.icsalabs.com] On Behalf Of George Capehart
    Sent: Saturday, June 18, 2005 6:56 PM
    To: Marcus J. Ranum
    Cc: firewall-wizards@honor.icsalabs.com
    Subject: Re: [fw-wiz] Transitive Trust: 40 million credit cards hack'd

    Heh. Just wait until Web services get widely deployed . . . No one is
    even thinking multiple trust boundaries yet . . . much less how to make
    systems operate across them. All the lessons we learned from the DCE,
    CORBA, Kerberos, SESAME, et al. (about what happens when one crosses
    trust boundaries (/*within* the organization*/) are about to be learned
    all over again, but with a much larger population . . . It's going to be
    a mess . . . And there will be no Plan B because no one has a clue what
    they're getting into . . . I gave a talk at OWASP last year that
    touched on this and, out of an audience of a couple of hundred people,
    only a handful showed that they'd understood the magnitude of the problem.

    Cheers,

    /g

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  • Next message: Marcus J. Ranum: "RE: [fw-wiz] Transitive Trust: 40 million credit cards hack'd"