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Comment by IYasha | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the insight and links!

And really... > relying on a trusted third party ... like GitHub seems like a way better default than PGP's Web of Trust

Made me scream: "What??" I'd personally prefer some decentralized torrent-like way of user key distribution.

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Distribute your public keys via DNS TXT records:

https://www.go350.com/posts/age-file-encryption/#age-pki-iss...

That only creates a link between SSH keys and a domain; It's even worse than relying on GitHub since you have to trust that multiple account haven't been hacked (registrar + DNS) and that neither the DNS host nor the registrar are acting maliciously.

I agree. DNS is its own bundle of insecurity.

Psst. Github has all that stuff too. Just more because it is a growing and changing webapp instead of an ancient, solidified key value store.

What would that look like? Distributing keys is always the hard part.

Well, I tried to avoid saying blockchain, which is already being implemented https://hackernoon.com/decentralized-public-key-infrastructu... but is resource-heavy. On the second thought, there are potential problems with DHT-like way of distribution (rogue peer overwhelming, etc) I can't seem to find article on this idea (it's pretty old), sorry.

Its kind of missing the point (unless im missing something). The hard part is linking keys to well known identifiers (ensuring that a malicious person can't trick you into thinking you have someone else's key when you really have the evil person's).

Having an append-only store is not the hard part of the problem and there are much better solutions than blockchains for that.

Identifiers are just attributes. If you want to attach a library card, US Passport, refugee id to a blockchain instance of your identity, you can inherit that endorsement.

In NIST speak, you can get a level 2 assurance level (good for most commerce) by collecting two strong identifiers or verifying one.

That does not solve the problem. If it did, we would have solved the problem decades ago

Case in point - pgp supports exactly that - you can have keys, which can have attributes which are endorsed by your key. We've had this since the 90's. It didn't solve the problem back then, reinventing the same thing but worse using blockchains won't solve the problem now.

Distributing small chunks of text sounds like the wrong problem to call "hard". It is building trust in them. Problems with the web of trust are well documented and pretty much boil down to "random people in the Internet turn out to not really be the most trustworthy of mediums".

There’s one final problem even harder than that. Creating a UI that by itself explains this whole complex concept, to a user with an average attention span of 3 microseconds.

Just look at how many scam attacks have been made possible just on urls.

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