Talk:Papers:Sending the Right Signals

beltzner, Jan 25th, 3am PST

• first draft completed and ready for comment
  • feel free to make grammatical/spelling edits inline, I haven't bothered to do that check yet
  • if you find it easier to insert comments in the text itself, again, feel free
• with screenshots, this will be 4 pages in length
• I used "trustworthiness" a lot, instead of "authentication"; is that OK?
• dbaron said that the goal of these meetings was to generate discussion, and that was the approach I took as opposed to attempting to design the perfect UI, since the underlying technologies aren't neccessarily finalized, and since it's not yet determined if there will be multi-level authentication or preferred CAs. As a result, I tried to keep the position paper at a general level, commenting on what's needed as criteria for success for any solution. That said, I tacked on some simple proposals at the end :)
• On a re-read, I think I might need to tie together the idea that I'm approaching this from a "how do we make online authentication as close as possible to the real world equivalent" or "what can we learn about how we already make these judgements in order to apply that to the UI" perspective.
• I'm rambling, aren't I? I'll stop now.

hecker, Jan 25, 10:30am EST

This is a useful beginning. Some quick comments:

• Using "trustworthiness" and similar terms is I think OK, as long as you are taking the perspective of the end user, who ultimately is the one making the decision on whether a particular service can be trusted (as in your RL examples).
• You write, "A connection to an entity should be said to be 'secure' when the connection is encrypted and it can be reasonably assured that communication is restricted to the user and the entity." One key question is, what does "reasonably assured" mean in this context? For example, by one interpretation connections made using self-signed certificates could be referred to as "secure", at least if there is some reason to believe that the certificate in question is in fact associated with the entity in question. (For example, the self-signed cert may have been exchanged out-of-band, or the user may have identified it as being associated with the entity based on other signals.) Another key question is, what does "entity" mean in this context? For example, some might interpret 'entity' as referring to the web site itself (i.e., a web server accessible at the particular domain name) and others might interpret 'entity' as referring to the web site operator (i.e., an identified individual or organization).
• In general I prefer using the phrase "identified by" to "signed by". My only caveat is that it doesn't read as smoothly in cases where the certificate is associated with a domain name rather than an individual's or organization's name.