I was recently reading The SSL Certificates HOWTO. The last section of the document is a blurb on the need for a global public key infrastructure (pki). This got me thinking about alternatives to the current "pay Verisign (or one of their other fronts) ~$1000/year" approach to SSL Certificates.

The obvious alternative is to self-sign the certificates. The only major problem (and it is major) that I see with this is that when such a certificate is used on a website, the browser will display a rather unsettling message to the user. This damages your site's credibility and will result in a drastic loss of confidence on the part of your potential customers. But what are the other alternatives?

Doing several searches on this topic, I've come across many suggestions of "webs of trust" basically a p2p model of people vouching for others they know. This seems extremely open to abuse (create 10-20 false identities and you're set) and I am left with the feeling that there has to be a better way.

An open, non-profit consortium dedicated to becoming the de facto standard in certificate handling seems to be a viable solution. There would be a few problems, such as initial costs, legal liability, creating the initial trust, but nothing I can see that can't be overcome. My question then is, why hasn't this already been created? Is there something I'm not considering here that warrants Verisign and company's borderline extortion?

Thank you for your replies.

In reply to (OT) SSL Certificates: Self-Signing and Alternative Solutions by Anonymous Monk

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