Certificate Authorities

jpritikin

An article I read implied that it should be possible to use
Ethereum to replace Certificate Authorities, like who certify the ssl
certificates.

How would you do this?

I don't have any great love for the CAs, I'd love to see a better way.
However, even the current CA stuff does not work well.

1. there are many different levels that CAs try to sell/upsell you
   which are worthless. A more expensive certificate does not buy you
   anything.
   
2. there are so many different CAs that you, as a web surfer, do not
   know if a site is more real than another, and probably never even
   looked at a certificate chain.
   

So if I publish I am the owner of [1]grant.org on ethereum, how do I
prove this initially? How or what would you need to have in place so
that you could eliminate the CAs and just use Ethereum? It seems that
somewhere along the line, someone or something has to somehow verify
you are really who you say you are and that you own what you say you
own (i.e. certifiy it) and then, this could be published via ethereum.
But it's down to who you trust... You can't trust the CAs because
there are so many of them and you can't possibly know them all. How is
this supposed to work???

Smithgift

Well, if everyone switches to Ethereum based nameserver-esque systems, you prove you are the owner of "[1]grant.eth" by proving you have it registered on Ethereum name-registration contract.

The other possibilities are reputation systems to show that you are a reputable person with reputable friends to say that you are who you say you are, though IMHO that may be more like a tradition Web of Trust.

luzlu

For a start have a look at https://letsencrypt.org

Here is the draft of their autonomous CA protocol, which validates your domain ownership autonomously:
https://letsencrypt.github.io/acme-spec/

Find the implementation on github.
Well it is still centralized, but I guess porting and evolving it to ethereum, etc. is just a question of time.