Tofu, online trust, and spiritual wisdom

At the European Identity Conference a little while back, Andre Durand gave a downright spiritual keynote on Identity in the Cloud. His advice for dealing with the angst of moving highly sensitive identity information into the cloud? Ancient Buddhist wisdom.

All experiences are marked by suffering, disharmony, and frustration.

Suffering and frustration come from desire and clinging.

To achieve an end to disharmony, stop clinging.

(I can’t wait to hear his pearls of wisdom at the Cloud Identity Summit later this month… I’ll be there speaking on UMA. You going?)

This resonated with another plea I’d just heard from Chris Palmer at the iSEC Partners Open Security Forum, in his talk called It’s Time to Fix HTTPS.

Chris’s message could be described as “Stop clinging to global PKI for browser security because it is disharmonious.” He reviewed the perverse incentives that fill the certificate ecosystem, and demonstrated that browsers therefore act in the way that will help ordinary users least.

Why, he asked, can’t we convey more usable security statements to users along the lines of:

“This is almost certainly the same server you connected with yesterday.”

“You’ve been connecting to almost certainly the same server all month.”

“This is probably the same server you connected with yesterday.”

“Something seems fishy; this is probably not the same server you connected with yesterday. You should call or visit your bank/whatever to be sure nothing bad has happened.”

Perhaps I was the only one not already familiar with his names for the theory that can make these statements possible: TOFU/POP, for Trust On First Use/Persistence of Pseudonym. Neither of these phrases gets any serious Google search love, at least not yet. But I love TOFU, and you should too. (N.B.: I’m not a big fan of lowercase tofu.) The basic idea is that you can figure out whether to trust the first connection with a nominally untrusted entity by means of out-of-band cues or other met expectations — and then you can just work on keeping track of whether it’s really them the next time.

The neat thing is, we do this all the time already. When you meet someone face-to-face and they say their Skype handle is KoolDood, and later a KoolDood asks to connect with you on Skype and describes the circumstances of your meeting, you have a reasonable expectation it’s the right guy ever after. And it’s precisely the way persistent pseudonyms work in federated identity: as I’ve pointed out before, a relying-party website might not know you’re a dog, but it usually needs to know you’re the same dog as last time.

Knowing of the desire to cling to global PKI in an environment where it’s simply not working for us, Chris proposes letting go of trust — and shooting for “trustiness” instead. If it successfully builds actual Internet trust relationships vs. the theoretical kind, hey, I’m listening. There’s a lot of room for use cases between perfect trust frameworks built on perfect certificate/signature mechanisms and plain old TOFU-flavored trustiness, and UMA and lots of other solutions should be able to address the whole gamut.

Surely inner peace is just around the corner.