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Please kill public key
It's late night here I'm not at all serious in starting this thread but perhaps
this helps us view the situation in a new light... i'm copying some
of your text Bill, I hope you don't mind ;-)
---
Since there are people arguing to save public key, I just wanted to
reemphasize that:
0) it adds cryptographic complexity -- you essentially need a
different cryptographic protocol for PSK vs. signature keys. Let's
spend the cycles of our cryptographers on more important stuff than
this.
1) it adds YET ONE MORE OPTION you need to test, one more knob you
can misconfigure.. more time for customers spent fumbling around
trying to figure out how to configure systems.
2) equivalent functionality can be found centralized configuration tools.
3) public keys use more CPU
4) according to information posted on this mailing list, 80%
of users use preshared secrets. isn't that enough, why bother
with the remaining 20%
5) this talk about IKE complexity... please! take a look at the
implementations. IKE is propably in the order of 5-10% of
the code, while public key and PKI (yes I know it is not mandatory)
is nearer 50%. Guess where all the interoperability faults were
in the latest bakeoff?
6) IETF hasn't done *anything* on fixing PKI complexity. We're
cutting a few options from a protocol, while most IKE experts
can't even remember the name of all the PKI protocols and
formats they need to support. Where's the IESG ban on
adding stuff to X.509 because it was never properly analyzed?
There's no need for it, it adds complexity. Kill it.
References: