Re: WG Chair comments on draft-ietf-secsh-agent-01.txt

[Nicolas Williams <Nicolas.Williams%sun.com@localhost>]

On Tue, Jul 15, 2003 at 06:25:52PM -0400, Bill Sommerfeld wrote:
> Two comments:
> 
>  1) "split" references (there's only one and it's normative)
> 
>  2) security considerations section doesn't mention the case where you
>     do an ssh-add into a forwarded agent connection.  While this
>     exchange is protected via encryption, it does involve casually
>     moving a long-term public keypair over the net to a remote system,
>     which should raise a few eyebrows..
> 
> It is not clear to me what we should do about this.  Either we should:
> 
> a) suggest that implementations detect and warn about this case,
> 
> or 
> 
> b) redesign the protocol so that SSH_AGENT_PRIVATE_KEY_OP requests
>  flow towards the node with the key rather than having all keys and
>  requests flow to the "root" agent.
> 
> Any comments from the rest of the WG?

Perhaps an optional message could be added to indicate that a node has
added a key to the [now distributed] agent.  Of course, now we'd have
bidirectional agent channels, with requests and responses going in
either direction.

Nico
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