Comment by feelin_googley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by feelin_googley | Hacker News Reader

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"Can you do that automatically, ie, without human intervention at all?"

Why not use something like SSH authentication keys to verify the endpoint? (e.g. ed25519 which can be generated very fast)

Consider the vast number of endpoints that are now currently being verified using authentication keys.

For something like encryption, I believe some human intervention will always be required. Only a human can answer the question: "Do you trust this?"

The issue is which humans are intervening: (a) the humans at each endpoint, or (b) the humans at each endpoint plus third parties.

Letting the www commercial CA vendors and commercial ad-supported www browser authors answer the question "Do you trust this?" on behalf of users is still human intervention. Unfortunately for users, this is delegating the intervention to humans that have no "skin in the game". The third parties are not the ones with the need to encrypt. They stand nothing to lose if the encryption is defeated.

Common sense suggests this is the wrong approach. (And that's ignoring the ever-increasing number of exposed flaws and "incidents" regarding www commercial CAs, like the one being discussed in this thread.)

SSH authentication is TOFU, trust on first use. The user will be asked to confirm if the endpoint is legit.

But the average user has no idea if the website saying it's paypal really is paypal. Could be payscam instead, operated by Mr. Untrustworthy, AZ.

SSH works because the servers and endpoints you connect to are usually endpoints the user has setup themselves and are in the local area network.

>Unfortunately for users, this is delegating the intervention to humans that have no "skin in the game".

CA's do have skin in the game. If they fuck it up too often nobody will trust them anymore to verify trust. See: StartSSL, Symantec and soon Trustico.

If the encryption is defeated then the CA's entire business model collapses. The CA's have strong incentives to not fuck it up or not get caught doing so.

With Certificate Transparency we have tools to catch anyone trying to not get caught cheating.

>Common sense suggests this is the wrong approach. (And that's ignoring the ever-increasing number of exposed flaws and "incidents" regarding www commercial CAs, like the one being discussed in this thread.)

To verify the key of a endpoint you either have to decide yourself if it is trustworthy or rely on a third party.

If you don't verify with a third party and you don't ask the user if the connection is okay, MitM is trivial.

If you ask the user, social engineering can make MitM trivial.

A third party will be required in some way, be it a CA or the Web of Trust or something else. However, the CA model has been the only one that successfully operated at this scale. The WoT has largely degraded to TOFU for 90% of users.

"A third party will be required in some way, be it a CA or the Web of Trust or something else."

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