4 ms·

> no realistic choice but to go through a centralized gatekeeper This is the critical part. Even though Let's Encrypt is not-for-profit, etc. It is still a sin

> no realistic choice but to go through a centralized gatekeeper This is the critical part. Even though Let's Encrypt is not-for-profit, etc. It is still a single entity. Until someone can go and start their own CA in that 10 minutes that works across the world, we're moving away from and not towards what HTTP was.

AmericanChopper 6y ago
The A in CA is always going to stand for authority. The basis of the CA system is that CAs (supposedly) can be trusted. If you remove the hard parts of being a CA, then you remove the basis for that trust (however questionable it was to begin with). You don’t have an authority any more, you just have an ephemeral group of self-attesting certificate issuers, and why would you even need the issuers in that case? These are just the general (and unsolved, or perhaps even unsolvable) problems associated with PKI. I think there’s a solid argument to be made about separating the encryption of communication from the authentication of server identity. That would solve one problem, but it would also just take an existing bad problem and (arguably) make it a lot worse. Given all of its horrendous shortcomings, the CA system is still the most successful PKI ever created, by quite a large margin.
- Silhouette 6y ago
  The usual alternative proposal is some form of decentralised web of trust. This has the significant advantage that it includes neither the letters CA nor SPOF. But of course it has difficulties of its own, and unfortunately it's hard to see how we could move safely and reasonably quickly in that direction given the entrenched powers that now dominate the CA and browser markets. It is worrying that Let's Encrypt is currently the only major provider of free, relatively easily arranged certs, though. Its success has been impressive, but it's probably also one of the biggest single points of failure in modern Web infrastructure now.
  - AmericanChopper 6y ago
    The problem with a decentralized web of trust isn’t that CAs are too entrenched to be replaced. It’s that there’s no such thing as an alternative decentralized web of trust solution, and no reasonable idea about how one could be created. Amazon reviews work on a decentralized web of trust model, and any PKI attempting to implement one is going to run into exactly the same issues that those have. The trust has to be put somewhere. It’s not realistic to expect the users to validate trust themselves, if you establish an authority to trust, then it can abuse its power, and if anonymous participants can abuse your model, then anonymous participants will abuse your model. All decentralized web of trust models lean towards one of those problem categories. They can be too onerous to be usable (like the original PGP proposal), easily abused, or simply create even more dubious shadow authorities. There is no known PKI model that solves all of those problems at once, and not really any basis for even presuming it’s possible.
    - Silhouette 6y ago
      Just to be clear, the problem I think we're trying to solve with a web of trust is the authentication one, not the encryption one. Several existing systems such as GPG demonstrate the viability of a web of trust solution in principle. What is currently missing is a practical method of scaling up. Yes, any such method would inevitably require a different process to how things work today, most likely including some sort of administrative action to get a new domain recognised when setting up a new site. Still, if you'd suggested seven or even six years ago that anyone would be able to set up effective HTTPS hosting with relatively little effort and without paying for an expensive certificate from some big name CA, you'd probably have been laughed out of the building. Five years ago, Let's Encrypt was starting its rapid rise to dominance, and as the various limitations in the original scheme have been removed, that rise has shown no sign of slowing down.
      - bmm6o 6y ago
        Encryption without authentication is meaningless, and it's no accident that https has them so tightly linked. If you can't tell that you are securely communicating with mitm, what's the point?
danans 6y ago
> Until someone can go and start their own CA in that 10 minutes that works across the world, we're moving away from and not towards what HTTP was. Would you trust the authenticity of content that originated from a site signed with such a CA? If so, why? PKI is just a technology for verifying trust over untrusted channels. But that trust is created in and remains rooted in the real world, and is itself built on societal chains of trust. No technology, centralized or decentralized, will replace real world trust in human societies any time soon. Trustless tech only works if it's based on a society with trust. Otherwise the tech is meaningless.

AmericanChopper 6y ago

The A in CA is always going to stand for authority. The basis of the CA system is that CAs (supposedly) can be trusted. If you remove the hard parts of being a CA, then you remove the basis for that trust (however questionable it was to begin with). You don’t have an authority any more, you just have an ephemeral group of self-attesting certificate issuers, and why would you even need the issuers in that case? These are just the general (and unsolved, or perhaps even unsolvable) problems associated with PKI. I think there’s a solid argument to be made about separating the encryption of communication from the authentication of server identity. That would solve one problem, but it would also just take an existing bad problem and (arguably) make it a lot worse. Given all of its horrendous shortcomings, the CA system is still the most successful PKI ever created, by quite a large margin.

Silhouette 6y ago
The usual alternative proposal is some form of decentralised web of trust. This has the significant advantage that it includes neither the letters CA nor SPOF. But of course it has difficulties of its own, and unfortunately it's hard to see how we could move safely and reasonably quickly in that direction given the entrenched powers that now dominate the CA and browser markets. It is worrying that Let's Encrypt is currently the only major provider of free, relatively easily arranged certs, though. Its success has been impressive, but it's probably also one of the biggest single points of failure in modern Web infrastructure now.
- AmericanChopper 6y ago
  The problem with a decentralized web of trust isn’t that CAs are too entrenched to be replaced. It’s that there’s no such thing as an alternative decentralized web of trust solution, and no reasonable idea about how one could be created. Amazon reviews work on a decentralized web of trust model, and any PKI attempting to implement one is going to run into exactly the same issues that those have. The trust has to be put somewhere. It’s not realistic to expect the users to validate trust themselves, if you establish an authority to trust, then it can abuse its power, and if anonymous participants can abuse your model, then anonymous participants will abuse your model. All decentralized web of trust models lean towards one of those problem categories. They can be too onerous to be usable (like the original PGP proposal), easily abused, or simply create even more dubious shadow authorities. There is no known PKI model that solves all of those problems at once, and not really any basis for even presuming it’s possible.
  - Silhouette 6y ago
    Just to be clear, the problem I think we're trying to solve with a web of trust is the authentication one, not the encryption one. Several existing systems such as GPG demonstrate the viability of a web of trust solution in principle. What is currently missing is a practical method of scaling up. Yes, any such method would inevitably require a different process to how things work today, most likely including some sort of administrative action to get a new domain recognised when setting up a new site. Still, if you'd suggested seven or even six years ago that anyone would be able to set up effective HTTPS hosting with relatively little effort and without paying for an expensive certificate from some big name CA, you'd probably have been laughed out of the building. Five years ago, Let's Encrypt was starting its rapid rise to dominance, and as the various limitations in the original scheme have been removed, that rise has shown no sign of slowing down.
    - bmm6o 6y ago
      Encryption without authentication is meaningless, and it's no accident that https has them so tightly linked. If you can't tell that you are securely communicating with mitm, what's the point?

danans 6y ago

> Until someone can go and start their own CA in that 10 minutes that works across the world, we're moving away from and not towards what HTTP was. Would you trust the authenticity of content that originated from a site signed with such a CA? If so, why? PKI is just a technology for verifying trust over untrusted channels. But that trust is created in and remains rooted in the real world, and is itself built on societal chains of trust. No technology, centralized or decentralized, will replace real world trust in human societies any time soon. Trustless tech only works if it's based on a society with trust. Otherwise the tech is meaningless.