3 ms·

The WoT concept is flawed but it is the lesser evil. Also it is not the critic's place to dictate what standard of assurance anyone else should accept. All sch

by ds9 13y ago

The WoT concept is flawed but it is the lesser evil. Also it is not the critic's place to dictate what standard of assurance anyone else should accept. All schemes to verify identification of an entity with a key are probabilistic and in some degree unreliable. Even if the correspondent is your best friend and you exchange keys in person, there is the possibility that one of you will fail to maintain exclusive control over his/her secret key. The question is which methods are best in a relative sense - and what qualifies as "good enough" is for each operator to decide. Of the two major alternatives, the CA system (and other schemes of similar design, relying on trusting third parties) and the web of trust based on individuals' estimations - of these, the latter is clearly more reliable. It was hard to convince anyone of this years ago, but the tech world has (mostly) now recognized the folly of third-party systems after painful experience. EDIT: Corrected "former" to "latter", per post below - thanks!

jholman 13y ago
You wrote: > Of the two major alternatives, the CA system ... and the web of trust ..., of these, the former is clearly more reliable. That is, you wrote "the CA system is more reliable than the WoT". I'm pretty sure you didn't mean what you wrote. It seems to contradict the rest of your post. Elaborating for the benefit of other readers: we have lots of evidence that the Certificate Authority system has been repeatedly compromised, certainly by state actors and probably also by (other) criminals. There are semi-solutions, like certificate pinning. One alternative (the only alternative I know of) is not trusting any Authority to get good certs, but rather getting them yourself, or from people you trust, or from people trusted by people you trust, etc... thus the Web of Trust. This alternative is pretty poor, but it might be less broken than CAs.

by ds9 13y ago

jholman 13y ago

You wrote: > Of the two major alternatives, the CA system ... and the web of trust ..., of these, the former is clearly more reliable. That is, you wrote "the CA system is more reliable than the WoT". I'm pretty sure you didn't mean what you wrote. It seems to contradict the rest of your post. Elaborating for the benefit of other readers: we have lots of evidence that the Certificate Authority system has been repeatedly compromised, certainly by state actors and probably also by (other) criminals. There are semi-solutions, like certificate pinning. One alternative (the only alternative I know of) is not trusting any Authority to get good certs, but rather getting them yourself, or from people you trust, or from people trusted by people you trust, etc... thus the Web of Trust. This alternative is pretty poor, but it might be less broken than CAs.