Jerry Leichter <[email protected]> writes: >The logical outcome of pinning is to get rid of the certs entirely. Your >browser vendor provides you with a bucket of public keys for well-known sites, >and you just use them.
Yup, and that's been proposed in the past (late 1990s) as a way of getting away from X.509's 1970s origins in offline systems. Instead of asking a source for a certified copy from some self-appointed authority (certificate from a CA) and then groping around for further information to check whether the certified copy you've just fetched is actually valid (CRL), you just ask the authority directly, "give me the currently-valid, known-good key for X" (pin from Google). This short-circuits all of PKI. For some reason it hasn't proven too popular with CAs and browser vendors. >Pinning is a hack to buttress a PKI system that we know is failing. I >appreciate the importance of having something that improves existing systems >as transparently as possible - it's so difficult to deploy anything entirely >new. As a transition - that's fine. But it shouldn't block us from thinking >about a better replacement. It's just a very roundabout way of implementing the "give me a known-good key for X" described above without disintermediating the CAs. Peter. _______________________________________________ Messaging mailing list [email protected] https://moderncrypto.org/mailman/listinfo/messaging
