Ray & Gutmann exchanged: | >The CAs can each fail on you independently. Each one is a potential weakest | >link in the chain that the Relying Party's security hangs from. So their | >reliability statistics multiply: | > | >one CA: 0.99 = 99% reliability | >two CAs: 0.99*0.99 = 98% reliability | >100 CAs: 0.99**100 = 37% reliability | | | 500 CAs: 0.6% reliability. | Thousands (via sub-CAs): Effectively zero. | | In other words once you get to the current morass of auto-trusted CAs, | failures of the kind we've been seeing are pretty much guaranteed. |
And others have suggested in various ways that binary trust is "wrong." In the various renditions of non-stop computing, a common theme is to do the same calculation more than once and compare the results, X'ing out the disagreements but keeping moving forward. I wonder if there is a paradigm there we might consider. --dan _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list [email protected] http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
