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No the problem is that we centralized trust instead of designing a distributed trust model. I suspect we centralized trust at the encouragement of folks like the NSA and similar ilk.

Regardless, look at the vast majority of technical users relying on SSH without using a CA for secure communications, had browsers done a better job at self-signed certs we could be doing the same on the web.




> Regardless, look at the vast majority of technical users relying on SSH without using a CA for secure communications, had browsers done a better job at self-signed certs we could be doing the same on the web.

How many technical users actually check the fingerprint matches the expected one of the server, out-of-band? Almost everyone I know just accepts the unknown fingerprint, so almost nobody knows who the endpoint they're actually connected to is.


It works OK as long as you're connecting to the correct one the first time, I suppose. But yeah, I agree.


> I suspect we centralized trust at the encouragement of folks like the NSA and similar ilk.

In the mid-90's, CA certs were put into Netscape Navigator (IE joined later) in order to facilitate the new wild wacky concept that someone might buy something online. They called it "e-commerce".

Trust was centralized because it was far easier to add the then ~half-dozen CA's rather then somehow vetting every joe that wanted to self-sign their certs. PGP's web-of-trust existed but it was deemed less viable.

Besides, the whole SSL certs thing was a major business premise behind creating Netscape - profits. Without that there might not have been a dot-com and the huge amount of money that followed since then.




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