Tony Arkles wrote:
> How do you propose to do this without human intervention?
The same way Microsoft turns blank Xbox 360s into keyed Xbox 360s.
Either the boxes have enough juice to generate their own pairs, or you
have a machine on a step of the assembly line before they go out the
door that generates a pair, sticks it in the db, and burns the private
key onto the board's EEPROM, along with Sasktel's pubkey and any other data.
> That public key has to get associated with the specific telephone
> number, correct? Either someone is going to have to copy the key from
No, it's associated with the box. The box has a UUID (the Mac) already.
If you have a nice db of public keys and Macs for them at Sasktel HO,
and each box has its own Mac + priv key + Sasktel's pub key, that's most
of the problem right there.
Associating it with the telephone number means you'd have to rekey a box
everytime you changed accounts, #s, etc, which is obviously not useful.
> I agree that the system as it is probably could use improvement. From
> my "life as a DSL installer" days though, I see this being way more of
> a pain-in-the-ass than simply making sure a set of keys are correct.
>
It'd already be fine at that point.
The pub/priv key pairs are only to ensure that the SIP configs (which
are encrypted with the Mac addr's pubkey, and thus only decryptable to
that box's private key) are not clear and are not trivial to decrypt.
Symmetrical encryption would not work, since getting 1 box and dumping
its firmware would allow you to dump any SIP config. By making each box
equally hard to defeat, you defang that attack.
And, yes, you could also then update the firmware to use the same
pub/priv key pairs to negotiate session keys for encrypted VOIP. Again,
not something your average butt-crack carrying installer needs to know
or be aware of, since installation is still keyed to the Mac.
Received on Thu Dec 14 03:05:28 2006
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