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Comment by __MatrixMan__

15 hours ago

It's been obvious for a while now that root-of-trust schemes create juicy targets, and that juicy targets attract all sorts of bad behavior that wouldn't be economical if we used a web-of-trust.

Building a web-of-trust scheme that works might not be easy, but also it's not like we've been trying exceptionally hard lately either.

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__MatrixMan__

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jcranmer  14 hours ago

Web-of-trust doesn't work. Even before the PGP web-of-trust broke down several years ago, analyses of how the web-of-trust actually ended up working out showed that it basically boils back down to CAs: people rely on a few highly central keys to do most of the signing rather than signing keys themselves, and these keys effectively function like CAs.

The broader issue is that users don't want to (and probably don't have the ability to) actually make any trust decisions; they much prefer to delegate all of the decisions on trustworthiness to somebody else. The PKI root CA system does have its flaws, but on the whole, I suspect that people like Mozilla are better stewards as to whether or not the person vouching for somebody else is trustworthy than the average or even the above-average user.

  • __MatrixMan__  14 hours ago

    Web of trust has been working between humans for over a million years. If we've failed to make computers do it, it's probably just for lack of trying.

    To your second point, that might be true in a world where the consequences of making a bad trust decision was some kind of hassle related to changing passwords or reporting your cards stolen. But we seem to be moving towards a world where it lands you in a detention facility or some other dire consequence. I think that sooner or later, users are going to realize that they want that control and will be willing to do the corresponding trust hygiene work. Besides, isn't making that kind of work easy the point of technology? We just need to do better re: making it usable rather than investing in systems we know to be unsafe.

    • jcranmer  9 hours ago

      > Web of trust has been working between humans for over a million years.

      I'm not sure that's really true. Human social organization has, until around 10,000 years ago, been centered on small groups of people where everyone literally knew each other. The ethnographic studies on non-state complex societies generally tends to show a lot of kinship-based networks that developed, and even in state societies that are facilitating long-distance trade, trade patterns and introduction into new areas is heavily reliant on membership of these kinship groups. State societies generally deemphasize these kinship groups, eventually doing away with them like in modern society, but the mechanisms for developing social trust are based on a very centralized development of the legal system--the government essentially enforces that people have to be trustworthy, or they face the wrath of government otherwise.

      Essentially, in short, the idea that humans have regularly been trusting people based on asking their close compatriots who they can vouch for doesn't seem to accurately model how trust develops in societies for most of human history--you either have vouching based on direct observation (in small societies), vouching based on identity (larger non-state societies), or centralized authority vouching for people (state societies, including today).

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    • eqvinox  13 hours ago

      Humans are generally considered to have been around for only ca. 300'000 years.

      Also, the interpersonal web of trust is IMHO quite clearly failing in the age of mass media, and not just recently.

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