[HacktionLab] FYI: Free certificate authority

[johnc]

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Hi,

I've some sympathy with this point of view although there are currently
only a few usable alternatives. Moxie's social notary approach is
interesting but still possible to game by creating loads of fake
approvals of a bogus cert, (Cybil attack). The Monkeysphere approach
seems quite promising and there is a browser plugin for firefox also.

I stumbled across namecoin lately which attempts to do decentralised DNS
as well as providing a distributed way of storing the SHA1 fingerprint
of a self signed SSL certificate. It's a fork of bitcoin and everything
is stored in the blockchain. You can register new domains with the .bit
TLD. There is a firefox browser plugin.

See link below for more info.
http://www.freespeechme.org/how-to-register-dot-bit-domains/

I was thinking of seeing how easy it would be to configure other
applications to use this.

Cheers,
John


On 21/11/14 09:17, ekes wrote:
> On 21/11/14 10:06, Christian Wach wrote:
>> On 20 Nov 2014, at 19:52, Charlie Harvey <charlie at newint.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Saw this and thought of the hacktionlab:
>>> https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/11/a_new_free_ca.html
>>>
>>> "Announcing Let's Encrypt, a new free certificate authority. This is a
>>> joint project of EFF, Mozilla, Cisco, Akamai, and the University of
>>> Michigan."
>>
>> What do you think of this counter-argument?
>>
>> <https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20141120073425-26662417-why-i-won-t-be-using-let-s-encrypt-and-recommend-other-not-to-also>
> 
> tl;dr X.509 is broken so we shouldn't dirty ourselves by lending it any
> more credence. To encourage people use it gives them a false sense of
> security.
> 
> Maximalist position that doesn't give people the, actually real, layer
> of protection they could get now; and working for an alternative doesn't
> negate getting more people to use the agreed standard at the moment.
> 
> ekes
> 
> 
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> 

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