Re: Why are we still using the CA model? (Re: Microsoft deems all DigiNotar certificates untrustworthy, releases updates)

[Martin Millnert <millnert () gmail com>]

Gregory,

On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 1:23 PM, Gregory Edigarov
<greg () bestnet kharkov ua> wrote:
> On Mon, 12 Sep 2011 12:12:08 +0200
> Martin Millnert <millnert () gmail com> wrote:
>
> > Mike,
> >
> > On Sun, Sep 11, 2011 at 8:44 PM, Mike Jones <mike () mikejones in> wrote:
> > > It will take a while to get updated browsers rolled out to enough
> > > users for it do be practical to start using DNS based self-signed
> > > certificated instead of CA-Signed certificates, so why don't any
> > > browsers have support yet? are any of them working on it?
> >
> > Chrome v 14 works with DNS stapled certificates, sort of a hack. (
> > http://www.imperialviolet.org/2011/06/16/dnssecchrome.html )
> >
> > There are other proposals/ideas out there, completely different to
> > DANE / DNSSEC, like http://perspectives-project.org/ /
> > http://convergence.io/ .
>
> I.e. instead of a set of trusted CAs there will be one distributed net
> of servers, that act as a cert storage?
> I do not see how that could help...
> Well, I do not even see how can one trust any certificate that is
> issued by commercial organization.


As I understand it the idea is that you would have the
power/capability to assign trust yourself to friends, CAs and your
cat.  This then forms some form of (washed out word-warning) web of
trust, when you connect up with others and get their
one-step-away-trust imported.


Outsourcing trust is a pretty hard problem... there's no way to get
around it, really, so this approach (as per my limited research) at
least gives you some power to control it.

Regards,
Martin