Public Key Infrastructure: An Artifact...

[Bram Cohen]

On Sat, 11 Nov 2000, R. A. Hettinga wrote:

> Conventional, hierarchical PKI, built around the ISO standard X.509, has
> been, and will continue to be, a substantial failure. This paper examines
> that form of PKI architecture, and concludes that it is a very poor fit to
> the real needs of cyberspace participants. The reasons are its inherently
> hierarchical and authoritarian nature, the unreasonable presumptions it
> makes about the security of private keys, a range of other technical
> defects, confusions about what it is that a certificate actually
> authenticates, and its inherent privacy-invasiveness. Alternatives are
> identified.

In the vast majority of cases, preventing man in the middle attacks is a
waste of time.

-Bram Cohen