I'll answer your final points first. To compare my brainstorming to trying to submit a paper to a journal isn't a relevant comparison. I'd say a better comparis

I'll answer your final points first. To compare my brainstorming to trying to submit a paper to a journal isn't a relevant comparison. I'd say a better comparison would be a student saying to a teacher "You know I thought a bit about this folding thing, wouldn't it be possible to...?". If I were that student I would expect to get the answer "No, because ..." - which is indeed the answer I got. I don't know about you, but the best way for me to learn something is to try to do it, fail, learn something from the failure and try again. In some fields, like in security, it's better if that failure is someone on HN telling me that I'm a clueless moron rather than someone else stealing a million credit card numbers due to me being a clueless moron. Thanks for the reading suggestion, and sorry for wasting your time with uneducated ideas. On to some thoughts on the other points. The signature would be over the content in its original form, so if it was transferred using gzip encoding it'd be ungzippped before verifying the signature. Since headers need to be signed too (and possibly the status line), I'd have to add another header that specifies which headers are in the signature, and the client would need to drop any non-signed headers before doing anything with the content. I'll need to read more about what can happen to a request along the way, though. I'll need to add a header that specifies the URI of the content too, to prevent someone from switching the content of different URIs ('yes' button graphics for 'no' button graphics or something like that). I was going to use the normal PGP infrastructure to get public keys, but if I trust the keylist to contain valid PGP identifiers I might as well put the public keys there and skip the PGP step (when I wrote the draft, I had recently looked into PGP and I suppose that everything looked like a PGP-shaped nail at the time). Putting a signature in the content would break it for browsers that don't support Content-Signature, so that wouldn't do. Adding post-content headers isn't allowed by HTTP, as far as I know, so that would also break for non-supporting browsers. Thanks for your feedback, and I'll try not to have as many gaping holes in my next attempt! I'll also make sure that someone who actually knows his stuff is responsible for security if and when I make a product that relies on it.