Having spent a few years dabbling in TLS stuff recently... I have some comments. This article is really about PKI more than TLS, and what it means to be a user

Having spent a few years dabbling in TLS stuff recently... I have some comments. This article is really about PKI more than TLS, and what it means to be a user's agent ("user agent"). Forgive my critical tone in advance, it's just that proposals like this need to go through the wringer... > you are supposed to be certain that you are communicating with the website you intended to visit. the green padlock in front of the URL in your browser tells you TLS is securing the connection. But this reasoning is wrong. No, it's not. It's correct to reason that the green lock (as implemented by most modern browsers) indicates a secure connection to the site in the URL bar. Now, whether that site is behaving virtuously... is a different matter, and not one that TLS is designed to solve. It also doesn't mean TLS is broken. (TLS is quite good, especially the emerging 1.3 standard. Qualms with TLS usually end up being about PKI, which is the best thing we've got widely deployed right now, whether you like it or not.) "Intended to visit" -- when we look at the browser as the role of the user agent, or in other words, a program that is supposed to act helpfully on behalf of the user -- the browser infers intent from what the user tells it to do. If you have a private chauffeur and you tell him to take you to such-and-such place, he will go there, even if you intended to go to such-another place. Oops? Maybe agents who know you really well could double-check with you if they think you meant something else, but do you really want your browser to know that much about you? > The real solution: get rid of certicificates This is ridiculous. Certificates make possible the cryptographic exchanges that guarantee confidentiality, host (and client) authenticity, and data integrity. Don't throw away the single most valuable component of modern Web security. > Being able to tell that we are visiting the same website as before allows us to establish a trust relationship with that website over time. With every positive interaction, our trust increases (and with every bad experience, our trust drops). We don’t need the website’s name for that. This isn't about TLS, this is now about PKI and trust model issues. Yes, there are various trust models and each have advantages and disadvantages. We went with PKI for the wider Internet because it fits the mold best when connecting machines to other machines at scale. In contrast, WoT and other models (including TOFU) work better in small groups of people or machines in semi-controlled environments (e.g. TOFU is manageable with your small-medium-sized fleet of servers).