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CA heirarchy vs Web of Trust
From: William.Soley@eng.sun.com (William Soley)
>Re: problem 3, about how allowing the user to specify their own list of
>trusted CAs is bad. All it takes is for any web page to put up text
>like ... "Dear Joe Sixpack, in order to assure your privacy while
>viewing these naughty pictures you must add the following certificate
>to your such-and-such file ..." and Joe Sixpack will be happy to do
>it. Even Mary Moderately-Savy might be tricked in to doing it on the
>false assumption that it would only affect security for the naughty
>pictures site (that she may not care about), and not affect security for
>her stock-broker. This false assumption might be based on the fact
>that the (legitimate) stock-broker uses a different CA.
Which is, of course, the key debate between a web of trust and
a CA heirarchy. We are stuck without the facility in Netscape 2.0,
because we are not commercially linked to RSA. At the end of the
day it is up to the end user to determine who to trust and not the
client software implementor. That, I think, is the correct position.
The client program should clearly indicate, however, who signed
the certificate and the Domain Name. This is still not much
commercial use as it gives almost no information about the organisation
offering services through the server.