If I want to spend $1000 to VeriSign, they issue a certificate after checking me out. A certificate issued by them is presumably good, because everybody trusts them.

However, a more general form is that my key (which I made myself) is signed by people I know personally. PGPkeys app will look at who signed my key, and do a recursive search all the way back to someone you said you trust because you know them personally (they're the ones who signed your key).

PGP's plan is a more general approach. I could have my friends sign it at a key-signing party, or I could pay a famous notary to sign it, or both. X.509 certifiates only have one authority signature, so it's much simpler.

The problem is, I don't know anyone personally who uses PGP regularly, to sign my key and be worth anything. It won't add it to the peer network, because we are all islands. The network is not hooked up!

So, how else do you get to know someone? From repeated exposure. I sign newsgroup posts to prevent fakes from appearing in my name. The reader can't prove that the signature really identifies a specific person, but he knows that all the posts are from the same person. A fake will stand out.

So, all my online friends know me from 10 years of correspondence. Many don't know what I look like, but they know me, to some extent. If I needed to, I could prove that a specific statement I issue is signed by the same person they "know", even though no authority is identifying me as an individual outside of that context.

That's the concept I'm using to make "grass-roots" (e.g. no big bucks to VeriSign) code signing work. A DLL is signed by somebody. So what? Well, if the same signature is used in many places that are visible, you can come to know the signor from those places and know that the code was written by the same person.

Signing a web page with the manual and whitepapers helps link the code to its creator. Signing the page that contains pictures of my family is not "necessary" for commerce, but helps keep the chain of identity, of "same person here", going. We have that link in face-to-face society. We know we're dealing with the same individual because we see and/or hear him and compare the face or voiceprint implicitly. I'm proposing one mechanism to continue that mechanism into cyperspace.

Now back to SSL. If you send me money, you want to know more specifically that I'm a legitimate business in line with the idienting marks on the page. It might be a business you've never seen before but found on pricewatch.com. Having an authority check it out is a great solution for that.

However, for someone who's not Amazon, spending $1000 per year is just bogus, especially if you're not sending me credit card info. Instead, what I really want, is to have a notary public sign my key for a $2 stipend. That's good enough for selling titled merchanice like cars, or making small legal contracts, right? So it should be good enough for some online purposes, too.

—John

Hi John

Well a few thoughts, mostly chaotic, BWTH..

There is no need to obtain a CA from verisign for big $$$. You could go to any number of free CA (thawte comes to mind) to get yourself a personal certificate.

However perhaps for perlmonks (hypothetically speaking) there might be a simpler plan, simply get an OpenSSL build and generate a root cert for the site. Then every time a user signs up issue them with their own certificate using this as a root CA. Explicitly trusting a certificate or authority when the exchange is of non critical information should be no problem. Any time a user wanted to post authenticable material they could email it signed or encrypted to the site or perhaps prepackage it as s/mime and post it that way. Once you learn OpenSSL little tricks (and there are a few :-) it is relatively easy to use it and MIME::Entity to facilitate secure arbitrary payloads. On the other hand how they meld with the visual interface of a web page is another story.

For me it all comes down to trust. Trust that the same person whose posts I have seen before is indeed the author of some document, or trust that this person is not a risk. And in the case of e-commerce the risk is not the value of the transaction being undertaken but simply the insecure exchange of financial details. For that kind of data I want to know that the information will not be abused, and to do that I need some form of validation beyond simply identity uniqueness.

On the other hand I like the idea that users of a forum like this have an easy way to authenticate posts and thus prove their identity, even if the true details of that identity are anonymous like they are here.

Yves
--
You are not ready to use symrefs unless you already know why they are bad. -- tadmc (CLPM)

I'm interested in a "free" CA. But thawte doesn't seem to be one. "Thawte Developer Certificates allow you to sign your code and macros for secure delivery over the internet." => $200 down plus $100 per year.

Searching more, I see they have "Personal Certificates" for free, which just allow signing of email.

Looks like they also have a "web of trust" thing with is the same as PGP's concept.

--mdash;John