[Freedombox-discuss] my summary of yesterday's Hackfest

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

On 03/01/2011 10:51 AM, Matt Willsher wrote:
> My point is rather: why not just use X.509 keys and certs and why use
> GPG/PGP at all? X.509 is multi purpose, well adopted and well trusted.

X.509 is certainly widely adopted, but that's about all you can say for it.

well-trusted?  not so much. here's a few links to get you started:


http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/sroosa/flawed-legal-architecture-certificate-authority-trust-model

  https://www.eff.org/observatory


https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/03/researchers-reveal-likelihood-governments-fake-ssl

  http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/rsa2011.pdf

And due to its single-issuer-per-cert design, X.509 is intrinsically
antithetical to the decentralized model that freedombox needs to follow:

  http://lair.fifthhorseman.net/~dkg/tls-centralization/

To be clear, I'm just arguing against adoption of X.509 as a certificate
format for the FreedomBox.

My argument does not cover:

 * message encryption and signature formats (e.g. PGP/MIME vs. S/MIME)
 * transport layer tunnelling and authentication (e.g. TLS)

these are separate decisions from the certificate formats, and should be
made separately.

	--dkg

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