As many of you might already know:

http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/371835374/article.pl

I will take this as an opportunity to state my opinion on our problems with certs :)

If we have a CA, we need to warn for self-signed certs. But if we do it like Firefox 3 - which some here considered the right way - it will scare users away - they can't talk or won't use crypto at all.

Another problem is that a CA means a single point of failure. If that CA is broken, someone can forge everyone. Plus I don't trust CAs generally.

So what's left?

* Self-signed keys
* GPG
* SRP

The problem with self-signed keys is that the fingerprint you need to verify is very long and most users just won't verify it.

The problem with GPG is that this is geeks-only.

The problem with SRP is bots.

So, I think we shouldn't concentrate on one of these. We should have more than 1 way. For example, if we have SRP and self-signed certs, we'd be fine. For bots, we could also add a CA so bots of the same owner trust each other by just having the root cert.

Any thoughts on this?

--
Jonathan

Attachment: PGP.sig
Description: This is a digitally signed message part

Reply via email to