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SSL certs sound like something that should be in a blockchain. Why isnt it?

by buboard 7y ago

patmorgan23 7y ago
Because block chain is still new tech. Certs have been around for decades.
hitpointdrew 7y ago
Because where is the incentive? Why would anyone be a "miner"? What reward would there be?
- buboard 7y ago
  could be a nonprofit, like letsencrypt
  - Biganon 7y ago
    That's not the point. In a decentralized system, every actor needs an incentive to mine new blocks in the chain. In cryptocurrencies, the incentive is the creation of new money attached to your name. But what if we're not dealing with a currency, but something else?
    - buboard 7y ago
      you are thinking of bitcoin. there are many different blockchain setups . and there is already namecoin
      - MertsA 7y ago
        The whole point of providing an incentive is to give a bunch of decentralized miners a reason to devote a reasonable amount of processing power to securing the blockchain. If there's only a single non-profit mining the chain, because why on earth would a bunch of other people throw money away for no reward, then for an attacker it's substantially more feasible to perform a 51% attack. For Bitcoin there's currently around $132,000 of incentive for mining given out every 10 minutes. In a race to the bottom that basically equates to a bit under $132,000 worth of compute resources expended for mining every 10 minutes. An attacker with enough resources to perform an attack on Bitcoin would have to spend more than that $132,000 every 10 minutes and keep it up for the duration of their attack. "Blockchain" for random hip projects more often than not is just buzzword nonsense that does nothing to improve security. A blockchain without mining is just silly, mining only works when it provides sufficient incentive such that attacking that blockchain is much more expensive than any payoff of attacking it is worth.
duskwuff 7y ago
It kind of is. Certificate Transparency logs -- which all modern CAs log newly issued certificates to -- are stored as a Merkle tree. https://www.certificate-transparency.org/log-proofs-work https://www.certificate-transparency.org/log-proofs-work What they aren't is coupled to other cryptocurrency nonsense like mineable/tradeable tokens.
dddddaviddddd 7y ago
How would proving control of a domain work?
- buboard 7y ago
  that's the hardest part, but how is it proved now? by providing evidence. A nonprofit like letsencrypt could be the custodian responsible for onboarding a new cert, after that they dont need to provide anything else. It is a problem that appears exactly once in a blockchain, while cert renewals are their achilles' heel

SSL certs sound like something that should be in a blockchain. Why isnt it?

patmorgan23 7y ago

Because block chain is still new tech. Certs have been around for decades.

hitpointdrew 7y ago

Because where is the incentive? Why would anyone be a "miner"? What reward would there be?

buboard 7y ago
could be a nonprofit, like letsencrypt
- Biganon 7y ago
  That's not the point. In a decentralized system, every actor needs an incentive to mine new blocks in the chain. In cryptocurrencies, the incentive is the creation of new money attached to your name. But what if we're not dealing with a currency, but something else?
  - buboard 7y ago
    you are thinking of bitcoin. there are many different blockchain setups . and there is already namecoin
    - MertsA 7y ago
      The whole point of providing an incentive is to give a bunch of decentralized miners a reason to devote a reasonable amount of processing power to securing the blockchain. If there's only a single non-profit mining the chain, because why on earth would a bunch of other people throw money away for no reward, then for an attacker it's substantially more feasible to perform a 51% attack. For Bitcoin there's currently around $132,000 of incentive for mining given out every 10 minutes. In a race to the bottom that basically equates to a bit under $132,000 worth of compute resources expended for mining every 10 minutes. An attacker with enough resources to perform an attack on Bitcoin would have to spend more than that $132,000 every 10 minutes and keep it up for the duration of their attack. "Blockchain" for random hip projects more often than not is just buzzword nonsense that does nothing to improve security. A blockchain without mining is just silly, mining only works when it provides sufficient incentive such that attacking that blockchain is much more expensive than any payoff of attacking it is worth.

duskwuff 7y ago

It kind of is. Certificate Transparency logs -- which all modern CAs log newly issued certificates to -- are stored as a Merkle tree. https://www.certificate-transparency.org/log-proofs-work https://www.certificate-transparency.org/log-proofs-work What they aren't is coupled to other cryptocurrency nonsense like mineable/tradeable tokens.

dddddaviddddd 7y ago

How would proving control of a domain work?

buboard 7y ago
that's the hardest part, but how is it proved now? by providing evidence. A nonprofit like letsencrypt could be the custodian responsible for onboarding a new cert, after that they dont need to provide anything else. It is a problem that appears exactly once in a blockchain, while cert renewals are their achilles' heel