OpenID status update

[Paul Crowley]

Brad Fitzpatrick wrote:
> -- it should be practical.  The phishing stuff sucks, I agree, but
>    it's not a war I want to fight.

OK.  I will bookmark and recommend others do similarly, but I won't try 
to fight this battle here.

> -- The overall flow of the protocol must remain the same.

The overall flow is fine.

> -- If we need to add expiry, multiple/named public keys, that's fine.

Even if that breaks existing fielded implementations?  Good.

> -- DSA's fine:
 > -- I don't like the idea of things being passed along in the clear
 >    anywhere.

I'll argue thiese in a later post.

> -- No encryption in the core.

This seems a weird requirement - legality of encryption isn't really a 
big problem any more.  But I don't currently see a need for encryption 
in the core, so I won't argue this just now.

>    And [DSA is] easier to check
>    than RSA signatures, I've heard?  No clue.  

No, it's much harder and slower: see 
http://www.eskimo.com/~weidai/benchmarks.html

0.18 ms for RSA verification versus 2.46 ms for DSA verification.

But the big win with RSA over DSA is that the signatures are much 
smaller, as Nicko van Someren noted in the Slashdot discussion about it.

> In conclusion: how do you guys all want this project managed?  It's
> easy for me to a dick/dictator and say no to feature-creep that
> doesn't belong in OpenID, but it's a lot harder for me to do so when
> it comes to security issues, since I know I'm out of my league.

Make me security dictator :-)/2
-- 
   __
\/ o\ Paul Crowley, paul at ciphergoth.org
/\__/ http://www.ciphergoth.org/