On Fri Aug 29 11:12:35 2008, Dirk Meyer wrote:
When I want to open a secure connection to you I could ask five notary
servers around the globe (e.g. different XMPP server in a different
domain). If four out of five report the same fingerprint for you I
could trust it. If they also report that the fingerprint is the same
for half a year now, I can be sure it is yours. Ok, it is not 100%
correct, but an attacker must manipulate many different server to fake
your key and an attacker can not know which notary servers I will
ask.

How are you asking them, though? via XMPP?

Presumably, an attacker who subverts your server could in principle then control the responses you get.

An alternate plan might involve your client contacting the notary domains directly, and using CA-based trust, but that raises the interesting question of who would want to run a Notary server.

Dave.
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