> If you don't the whole system is worthless.
The whole system is worthless and it should be replaced with something more like bitcoin. I don't really trust any certificate issuer more than I trust self issued certificate.
The whole system is worthless and it should be replaced with something more like bitcoin. I don't really trust any certificate issuer more than I trust self issued certificate.
What does that even mean?
Perhaps Google might want to sponsor this? :)
I guess we'll eventually get there, but unless we get decentralised I don't see how it could be done.
Honestly I have no idea how the current system is purported to work. And I just don't know what certificate is supposed to prove? That someone at some point in time had 100$ to spend on a cert? How's that more secure than self signed cert?
Why browser warns about self-signed and not about others? All thing seems to me to be more of a security theatre and money making scheme than actual trust system that reflects reality in any way.
I agree that the current system is broken, but I fail to see how a distributed system magically fixes this, most notably the issue of bootstrapping trust. I foresee that the distributed model moves to a more centralized model where we trust apple, microsoft, ubuntu.
Bootstrapping trust should start from entities that actually have information about identity.
Also information about identity should be explicit and carried through the system. What happens now for me looks like bunching together good and toxic assets and creating derivatives. Creating something that to general to fail.
Some people in comment refer to previous incident that didn't have any repercussions probably because it would have too many consequences.
One outstanding problem that comes to mind is certificate revocation when you have lost control of the private keys. I think a multi-sig solution could probably mitigate this to a fair extent, so you still have some level of pseudo-trust between entities and a way to effectively call someone up and say, "hey, I screwed up and need to kill this thing".
There is value in a higher barrier to entry. That much is seen in almost every place that has such barriers. Nintendo games are typically high quality and App Store apps are usually not (and Play Store -- not picking on anyone). I've seen much higher quality from sites hosted by regular hosting companies (and paid-for domains) than I do from sites like mysite.site99.commish.ru (if you'll excuse the exaggerated example). Self-signed is even worse than my exaggerated example when it comes to trustworthiness because there are far too many bad actors who want to do bad things but also don't have $100USD to spend on a cert. I don't doubt that some kind of better system can exist but self-signed is definitely less trustworthy.
I think that only government that issues my ID is the only party that can confirm my identity, so it, rather than private corporation should sign my cert only after it verifies my identity in the same way it would if for example I would testify in court.
If I wan't to associate cert with a company, only the office that registered my company can provide meaningful assurance about identity of my company.
The security of the system for propagating this assurance of identity of entity should not rely in any way on authority of any entity, public or private.
Also the assurances should be explicit. If someone confirms that I paid the utility bill for given address should only say that they confirm that I did that, not that I live there.
A standard domain-validated cert proves that the CA saw you as in control of the site's DNS. Because spoofing DNS for client machines is generally much easier than for servers this is a big improvement in security over a self-signed cert.