F21 System Wide Change: System-wide crypto policy

[Bill Nottingham]

Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos (nmav at redhat.com) said: 
> On Thu, 2014-02-27 at 11:52 -0500, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> > > == Detailed Description ==
> > > The idea is to have some predefined security levels such as LEVEL-80, 
> > > LEVEL-128, LEVEL-256,
> > > or ENISA-LEGACY, ENISA-FUTURE, SUITEB-128, SUITEB-256. These will be the 
> > > security levels 
> > > that the administrator of the system will be able to configure by modifying
> > > /usr/lib/crypto-profiles/config
> > > /etc/crypto-profiles/config
> > > and being applied after executing update-crypto-profiles.
> > > (Note: it would be better to have a daemon that watches those files and
> > > runs update-crypto-profiles automatically)
> > How is an admin supposed to know what levels such as the above are, and why
> > they might choose a particular one?
> 
> They will be documented. They could be part of the configuration file
> that be edited. The policies above are a indicative, so if there are
> suggestions they will be considered.

Well, even if they're documented, I don't know if they're particularly
meaningful items.  For example although I 'know' what SUITEB might refer to,
it still amounts to 'a set of algorithms the NSA deems sufficient'; it does
not give me any meaningful knowledge to compare it to other settings.  And
for all I know I'm aobve the curve on understanding what some of these are;
your typical administrator is likely to know even less. If they're merely
described in terms of what they represent - is it going to make the choice
clearer, or not?

i.e., how do ensure that the configuration choices are meaningful and
explicable to the administrators such they can make an informed decision
outside of "I checked the SUITEB-256 box because that's what the standard
243213 chapter 33 subsection 24 sentence 1 says".

Bill