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because web-of-trust-models worked so great for PGP/GPG. In theory that's great, but how can I confirm that the cert in the chain is indeed for google.com. Beca

because web-of-trust-models worked so great for PGP/GPG. In theory that's great, but how can I confirm that the cert in the chain is indeed for google.com. Because it's trusted by chrome which I downloaded from google.com (or at least a machine pretending to be google.com) or because my computer-illiterate friends trust it? Or because my OS trusts that cert? I agree that the current system is broken, but I fail to see how a distributed system magically fixes this, most notably the issue of bootstrapping trust. I foresee that the distributed model moves to a more centralized model where we trust apple, microsoft, ubuntu.

giovani 12y ago
I agree, the bootstrapping trust is a hard issue, and I don't think either that a distributed system will magically fix things. What would happen is we'd just change one set of problems for another one, but IMHO it'd be a better system overall. In this case, making things more visible is a better thing. That's an interesting point about the way a distributed model would evolve. My question is: does it matter? If we could more easily spot a bad actor, wouldn't it make everyone behave better?
scotty79 12y ago
Please check my response to sibling commenter. Bootstrapping trust should start from entities that actually have information about identity. Also information about identity should be explicit and carried through the system. What happens now for me looks like bunching together good and toxic assets and creating derivatives. Creating something that to general to fail. Some people in comment refer to previous incident that didn't have any repercussions probably because it would have too many consequences.
MrDosu 12y ago
Bring back the key exchange parties of old :D
flatline 12y ago
There's lots of newer research on trust-based systems that could be applicable here, e.g. a game-theoretic approach where entities are gauged based on ratings over repeated transactions. Think iterated prisoner's dilemma crossed with PageRank, which effectively wards against many types of collusion including simple sybil attacks. Most of it hasn't been validated in the real world on any scale, but I believe it is possible to do quite a bit better than we have seen - the only web-of-trust stuff I've seen in practice is ancient compared to the state of research. One outstanding problem that comes to mind is certificate revocation when you have lost control of the private keys. I think a multi-sig solution could probably mitigate this to a fair extent, so you still have some level of pseudo-trust between entities and a way to effectively call someone up and say, "hey, I screwed up and need to kill this thing".

giovani 12y ago

I agree, the bootstrapping trust is a hard issue, and I don't think either that a distributed system will magically fix things. What would happen is we'd just change one set of problems for another one, but IMHO it'd be a better system overall. In this case, making things more visible is a better thing. That's an interesting point about the way a distributed model would evolve. My question is: does it matter? If we could more easily spot a bad actor, wouldn't it make everyone behave better?

scotty79 12y ago

Please check my response to sibling commenter. Bootstrapping trust should start from entities that actually have information about identity. Also information about identity should be explicit and carried through the system. What happens now for me looks like bunching together good and toxic assets and creating derivatives. Creating something that to general to fail. Some people in comment refer to previous incident that didn't have any repercussions probably because it would have too many consequences.

MrDosu 12y ago

Bring back the key exchange parties of old :D

flatline 12y ago

There's lots of newer research on trust-based systems that could be applicable here, e.g. a game-theoretic approach where entities are gauged based on ratings over repeated transactions. Think iterated prisoner's dilemma crossed with PageRank, which effectively wards against many types of collusion including simple sybil attacks. Most of it hasn't been validated in the real world on any scale, but I believe it is possible to do quite a bit better than we have seen - the only web-of-trust stuff I've seen in practice is ancient compared to the state of research. One outstanding problem that comes to mind is certificate revocation when you have lost control of the private keys. I think a multi-sig solution could probably mitigate this to a fair extent, so you still have some level of pseudo-trust between entities and a way to effectively call someone up and say, "hey, I screwed up and need to kill this thing".