TOFU/POP is not an effective model for the web. There are simply too many sites for it to be useful. It's pretty much an everyday occurrence that I go to a site I've never been to before, and certificate pinning won't help at all there.
I am aware of both names, thank you.
>That only has to happen once for Google to put a gun to the rogue CA's temple.
Google can't really help in every single case. There are many situations where Google's revocation scheme can't keep up.
You also have to put a lot of trust in Google. You think Google is going to issue a revocation if they're under legal pressure not to?
As you are aware, human factors are frequently the weakest parts in a cryptosystem.
But it's unsuitable for the entirety of the web. You can't hardcode all certificate fingerprints of the whole internet inside the browser.
>> The migration away from the CA model is called "certificate pinning".
> key continuity destroys the incentive to attack sites by compromising CAs
We need to ELIMINATE CAs (CA as in some third party (google, Verysign, GoDaddy, ...) who you have to trust). The whole concept of trusting a CA is broken, and pinning does nothing to address that, at least not in the proposed TACK implementation.
I really feel the correct step forward is Convergence or Perspectives. If just browser vendors would jump in, we could use it right away. Mozilla/Google could set up a few notaries and set them as trusted by default in the browser. They choose the CAs they put in our browsers anyway, so we trust them already. That trust could be implemented with notaries instead of the CA model, so if someone wants to setup their own notaries they can.
What's your take on this? I value your opinion on security matters.
The biggest security problem on the Internet isn't protocols and it isn't cryptography. It's that the UX the browsers have for managing/configuring Internet trust hasn't changed since the late 1990s, and it's buried 3-4 levels deep in the "no user serviceable parts" section of the config UI. There are a lot of very productive things you could do for Internet security simply by revamping that UX, without making a single wire-level change to the TLS or HTTP protocols.