Re: "known in advance" public key authentication?

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

On 11/07/2012 10:18 PM, Ivan Shmakov wrote:
>       OTOH, most of the data transferred over such a channel will
>       either be public (and then either self-certifying or signed) or
>       already encrypted anyway.  Thus, for a start, I may forget about
>       authentication altogether.  Unfortunately, some fraction of the
>       data is likely to be at least mildly sensitive, and apart from
>       that, an authenticated channel opens a possibility of a DoS.

Without robust and reliable authentication of your peer, you can have no
guarantees of confidentiality.

Put another way: if you don't know who you are talking to, you cannot
have a private conversation.  You might be talking to the very person
you want to keep a secret from!

Association of a public key with a peer over an untrusted network is a
challenging problem.  Simply presenting a random public key at
connection time and expecting the other peer will automatically know
it's the right one opens your application up to a MITM attack.

You seem to be leaning in the direction of an unauthenticated
connection; while that might be sufficient against an eavesdropping-only
attacker, i advise you to reconsider.  On the internet, it's not a large
leap to go from an eavesdropper to a MITM :(

        --dkg

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