how could that work?
Ideally they have already verified your name, company and address, and you have to trust them to some extend anyway, because they are responsible for the name servers
So this is not solving the problem, this is moving it elsewhere.
I don't know which one was first, but I wish they would cooperate to establish a standard protocol for notaries.
The model of notaries that observe SSL certificates from multiple points in the internet seems greatly superior and ultimately more trustworthy than the CA model to me. It's not perfect, but it solves the most common man-in-the-middle scenarios and is potentially extensible to become even more robust.
> Convergence is based on the ideas originally developed by the Perspectives Project at Carnegie Mellon University.
- it completely leaks your browsing history: you basically ask a notary "what's the certificate you see for kinkyneighbors.com?". Convergence addresses this, though - it requires network-heavy intermediaries for all the browsing of all the people around the world. - it still doesn't solve authenticity: an attacker could very well be controlling all connections arriving at your house, or leaving the target's server, and fool everyone
Convergence/Perspectives should be coupled with certificate pinning, aka storing _really_ trusted authorities (ie verified by hand) on your computer. Guess what ? [Moxie's next project is just that [0]
(For anyone curious, I highly recommend Moxie's talk [1] about Convergence, it does a great job at explaining what's the problem, what's Convergence and how it can solve at least part of it)
[0] http://tack.io/
We (Qualys) are running several notaries and are part of the default configuration, and we're seeing very little traffic.
- Verification - Encryption
The CA is supposed to verify and say "hey this certificate belongs to this company".
What we need is for anyone to setup their cert without a CA (self-signed) and then the CA provides the verification is companies really want it.
This is what happens when you try and dual purpose something. If the certificate was just about encryption then my assumption is that you wouldn't really need CAs.
It's too bad, because some type of web-of-trust mechanism for HTTP would be an incredible idea - it doesn't solve the trust problem entirely, but it would enable users to share their trust profiles amongst or against trusted individuals.
Keep in mind certificate pinning is a fairly (very!) recent addition to the internet security landscape. Before then MITM more or less completely broke encryption.
As with much technology it is a re-invention of how we used to do things.
Many corporate websites still use client-side certificates to ensure that the client is talking to the correct server.
In the early days of Internet banking, some bank sites used to do the same; I received a cert from my bank on a shiny 'CD-ROM'. Sadly they discontinued that validation along with publishing their PGP key for secure e-mail. A step backwards.
I do think it's a dangerous idea, though. The difference between 'secure' and 'insecure' is (at least partially) understood by most technical and non-technical people, and sometimes they can make a good decision on their requirements. The difference between passive and active adversaries is much more subtle, and I doubt people can think this through with as much clarity.
And to those bringing up the tired, old rebuttal of this providing "worse" security due to a false sense of protection: that's only relevant if the browser is written idiotically and suggests this is in some way the same security as the fully-authenticated version. They should not be showing a "closed padlock" and changing the address bar color for self-signed SSL!