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Convergence, distributed, secure strategy replacing certificate authorities
- Egregore 15y agoWhat is the target user group of this project? I like the idea, but I know too few people who will really start using it.
- wladimir 15y agoWhat is the target user group of this project? People that value their internet security and are disappointed by the current SSL trust system. I'm sure it will have to see a lot of testing by interested power users first, before it is ready for prime time / default integration into browsers. Nevertheless, I think it is a very interesting development as it is much more realistic than the current trust system. Trust is no longer something absolute, eternal, dealt out by somehow globally fully trusted entities.
- sjs382 15y ago"Convergence, distributed, secure strategy replacing certificate authorities for users of Firefox"
- derrida 15y agoNew project. Get involved on GitHub. Write the Safari/Chrome version. Until browsers ship this with their main product, users will have to install plug-ins.
- StavrosK 15y agoWon't writing a plugin for one of Safari, Chrome or Opera mean that it can be used with the other two browsers? I think they all use the same plugin standard.
- jtdowney 15y agoMoxie Marlinspike is the creator of Convergence. I highly recommend watching his Blackhat 2011 talk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Wl2FW2TcA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Wl2FW2TcA) covering authenticity on the web and Convergence.
- derrida 15y agoDoubly recommended. Moxie Marlinspike is a great communicator and I suspect watching that talk will answer many questions people are likely to have.
- derrida 15y agoHere is a link to a previous discussion on HN about Convergence, with some contributions by Moxie Marlinspike, the creator. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2949199 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2949199
- fab13n 15y agoOne of the main security risks is social engineering. The only reason why my mum won't be tricked into adding a rogue CA root is because it's too complicated to do for her, even if she wanted to. * If it was as easy as installing a fake Flash plugin Trojan, she'd have installed plenty of rogue CAs already; * If it remains hard to do, she'll stick to the default config, which is what she does already. So, the main change wrt the current PKI system is that by default, her browser would probably check a certificate validity against a couple of top authorities, rather than a single one. I guess it would make getting a certificate a couple of times more complicated, hence a couple of times more expensive (if the process of trust propagation is fully automated, then I'm no safer than with a single CA signature). To sum up, I don't see how this would improve the situation for average Joes and Janes. Since Paypal, Amazon, Google etc. primarily care about average Joes, I don't see why they would adopt that kind of cyberpunk technology.
- marshray 15y agoGoogle cares that governments aren't man-in-the-middling their web browser when talking to their online services. That's how the DigiNotar breach was publicly disclosed. The browser/CA CAB forum knew about it and had been hiding it for weeks until an actual Chrome user posted a message in the Gmail support forum: https://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=2da6158b094b225a&hl=en https://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=2da6...
- 0x12 15y ago> The browser/CA CAB forum knew about it and had been hiding it for weeks That's really criminal.
- mypov 15y ago.. which perhaps calls for collectively mette punishment.
- eggdude 15y agoDigiNotar knew about and hid the attack. I don't believe there is any evidence that the CA/Browser Forum knew about the attack until it was made public.
- mike-cardwell 15y agoThe problems of certificate forgery and CA's that are too big to fail, can be fixed by extending the current system, to require certificates to be signed by multiple CA's, who do not fall under the same jurisdiction or influences. I wrote about this idea yesterday: https://grepular.com/Solving_the_SSL_CA_Debacle_Using_Multi-Signed_Certs https://grepular.com/Solving_the_SSL_CA_Debacle_Using_Multi-...
- marshray 15y agoN-of-M and co/countersigning schemes have been around forever. The problem isn't a lack of ideas or technical tools to fix it. The problem is that the industry prefers it the way it is.
- IgorPartola 15y agoIsn't a better long-term solution to simply have DNSSEC distribute your site's public key? The idea that I have to buy a domain name and an SSL certificate is silly. For extended validation, what should be verified is your public key, not your domain. So if the public key is also signed by a number of CAs, it is considered valid.
- dmm 15y agoBut how do I know which DNS servers to trust?
- kogir 15y agoThe ones with signatures that check out. That's the SEC part of DNSSEC. The root key(s) are published and you can verify authenticity all the way down.
- itsnotvalid 15y agoThis thing is as old as DEFCON 2011 (see http://blog.thoughtcrime.org/ssl-and-the-future-of-authenticity http://blog.thoughtcrime.org/ssl-and-the-future-of-authentic...) but in view of current events of certificate trustworthiness, there is quite a chance for anything that can successfully replace the approach of trusting CAs. Please view this blog entry (from the core author of convergence.io) to get the idea of also why DNSSEC is not a good approach (he had put it in the way that it's worse than CAs.)
- jvandonsel 15y agoStupid question on Convergence: If I could intercept ALL the traffic from your local network, couldn't I still perform a MITM attack by simulating both the destination host and the notary?