[whatwg] A few comments on the <keygen> tag

[Anders Rundgren]

Dear list,
I may indeed be biased since I run a private standardization effort coined KeyGen2 which is designed to replace <keygen>.
Anyway, it might be of some general interest knowing why I have started this thing.

Microsoft does not support <keygen>.  If I were Microsoft I wouldn't bother since all CAs have adapted themselves to Microsoft's scheme.  Microsoft's scheme (CertEnroll) is more flexible than <keygen>, albeit much more complex as well.

Now to the really problematic stuff:  <keygen> is not really an HTML tag, it is actually 2 phases of a 3-phase key provisioning protocol.  I don't see why a protocol should be plugged into a page GUI.  The alternatives all use APIs or specific plugins that indeed may be spawned from an HTML page but that's something completely different.

Just as a comparison I would like to mention the fact that the KeyGen2 schema is about 25 times the size of the <keygen> specification.   Although that could indicate a major design error in KeyGen2, the truth (according to me of course...) is that <keygen> is way too limited to be used by serious issuers like banks and governments.

I would also consider the "market" for <keygen>.  For PCs, physical token distribution is the standard, that's why there has been so little interest in on-line provisioning.  However, for mobile phones, on-line provisioning is really the only good method unless you are a government and buy into $200+ solutions like the following:
http://www.trustdigital.com/downloads/TD_EMM_CAC_Pack_101008.pdf

A difference with mobile phones is that when the phone=token you can do much cooler things than you can on a PC, including trusted execution and provisioning.  It seems a bit short-sighted to build on a 15 year old design without at least having investigated what is possible.

HTML5 looks great but I think you should stick to page layout and leave protocols either to JavaScript or to some other extension mechanism.

Regards
Anders Rundgren
http://keycenter.webpki.org


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