2 ms·
>Notary servers or groups of notary servers may be operated by public organizations, private companies, or even individuals. So "who watches the watchmen"?[1]
by jasode 10y ago
>Notary servers or groups of notary servers may be operated by public organizations, private companies, or even individuals.
So "who watches the watchmen"?[1]
It looks like the "notary servers" eventually become another variation of "certificate authorities" by another name.
If web users rely on a 3rd-party organization (that's not itself a notary server but only a rating agency), it means that the rating agency becomes another variation of CAs.
Every time I've studied this problem, all roads point back to a centralized trust model. Even if a technical solution to decentralized trust is devised, a social emergent phenomenon of centralized trust reappears. (Even Bitcoin with its decentralized aspirations suffered the social phenomenon of consolidating into pockets of centralized mining pools. Mining was theoretically democratic/decentralized but the real-world ability to spend money on GPU cards, then FPGAs, then ASICS is not decentralized.)
>Just like a user picks which search engine their browser will use, they user can also choose what group(s) of network notaries they will trust.
The average web surfer is not going to be going into their browser settings to adjust notary servers. Computer geeks and sophisticated techs like Bruce Schneier and Edward Snowden would tweak those hypothetical notary settings but a billion average users will not do that.
The typical non-tech web surfer is going to outsource the thinking about "which notary servers?" to somebody else. In response, a new centralized model overlaid on top of the notary servers would end up serving those users. Similar to how WebTrust is a reference for CAs.[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%...
[2] http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/11464/getting-a-root-ca-accepted-in-systems-and-browsers http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/11464/getting-a-...
- abecedarius 10y agoI don't know. Analogously there was a long period when IE dominated, and you could make a case that the web browser was a natural monopoly, and trying to compete would at best just end up in a different monopoly. I'm glad someone went ahead and challenged it anyway. An oligopoly is better for us than a monopoly; a two-party state is much better than a one-party state; and with a mechanism in place for competition, a monopolist must act more like a competitive firm even when the competition remains only potential.
- mcherm 10y agoI don't know what this project has done, but I can tell you how I would build it, and why this approach would be better than the approach used by our current system of certificate authorities. (1) In this model, the user decides which authorities to trust. With certificate authorities, the user must trust ALL of the "standard" authorities, or else wind up unable to verify sites that happen to purchase their cert from an untrusted authority. With notary servers, the end user can choose to trust whichever notaries they want (and not trust others) and can still validate certificates on all sites throughout the web. (2) It is possible to verify with more than one notary, but with certificate authorities each site is only (normally) signed by one CA. This means you could, for example, trust 5 different notaries and an attacker would need to suborn all 5, whereas with certificate authorities an attacker would need to suborn only 1. Since most users will not adjust the default settings, I would hope that browsers would ship configured to verify against a set of about 12 trusted notaries, approving any certificate verified by at least 9 of them. The only remaining piece needed is an onion-wrapped P2P protocol for forwarding the requests so that you don't leak your browsing history to all of the notaries.