Produce some mock-up user interfaces and prototypes, to demonstrate that this alternative model may actually be usable. Discuss these issues and behaviors with developers of emerging commercial technology, to ensure that we are not duplicating effort. Should the above work validate our hypothesis, we then need to explore how to actually integrate this new approach into the real infrastructure. We may start by patching this work onto Mozilla, to provide a more complete proof of concept. Original Proposal Text Expressing Trust Underlying all this work is the need to express non-trivial attributes across different domains.
Every application has different opinions about what constitutes safe.
We've been in discussion with vendors and other sources for the necessary tools. The secure coprocessing technology that Sean just spent four years offers a secure place to carry out sensitive computation beyond the observation or manipulation both of insiders as well as adversaries with direct physical access . FIPS 140-1 Level 4 validation gives this technology the highest possible assurance for a commercial U.S. security device. We're working on identifying areas in PKI-related distributed services where clients need to trust sensitive computation at servers, but have no basis for that trust. We're then trying to port this sensitive computation into secure coprocessors at the server, and integrate the coprocessor's PKI into the client-server PKI, so that the server operator of otherwise unknown credibility can prove that her service really has these properties.