ARCHIVE: http://www.cafax.se/keydist/maillist/

Secure Internet Key Distribution (SIKED)

This effort has a goal of understanding and possibly defining a 
protocol 
or set of practices for supplying public keys to elements of other 
protocols. The rationale for this goal is to enable 
security-enhancements of existing protocols.  Keying material must be 
dynamically refreshed to maintain secure states, one of the stumbling 
blocks in making security work is the distribution and refresh of this 
material.

The general problem of key management is beyond the scope of this 
effort. For example, the generation and derivation of keys are beyond 
scope, as well as the encoding of keys, whether raw or in certificates, 
is beyond the scope of this effort.  Determing a generic approach to 
trust is also out of scope.  The effort is strictly looking at how key 
distribution can be made to scale on the Internet.

The effort will begin with a few distinct efforts, with the early goal 
of a requirements document.  The first actions of the effort are to 
understand the various protocols that can benefit from a distribution 
of 
keys, and how this interacts with the each protocol as the protocol is 
currently defined. In addition, a few proposed approaches will be 
explored, as well as documentation of limitations on proposed 
mechanisms.

There is no guarantee that there is one and only one approach to key
distribution.  There are already divergent approaches and this effort 
is
not going to argue with them.