Hacker News
WebPKI and You
67 points by aragilar
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5 comments
aragilar
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It's worth noting that while splitting the PKI hierarchies is a good thing, the CABF does provide rules S/MIME (email signing) and Code Signing. Also, "WebPKI" never actually appears in the BR documents from what I can see, nor do they require the use of HTTP (hence why you can use these for SMTP).
ivanr
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If you like this sort of thing, perhaps you'll enjoy my SSL/TLS and PKI history where I track a variety of ecosystem events starting with the creation of SSL in 1994: https://www.feistyduck.com/ssl-tls-and-pki-history/
bob1029
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The short lived certificates started making a lot more sense to me when I discovered I could get Let's Encrypt to issue IP address certs. Clearly, in this context of use we need our certificates to die quickly.
You can now make any web server operate with a publicly valid TLS certificate without paying any money, registering a domain, configuring DNS or disclosing any personally identifiable information. It can be entirely automatic and zero configuration. The only additional service required is something like a STUN server so the public IP can be discovered and updated over time.
yosamino
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I am reading your comment and find the proposition interesting, but I can't quite understand the part about the STUN server - doesn't that "just" help me find my own public IP address ? Do you mean that I could then give out this address to others (instead of them having to do a DNS lookup) so they can connect to the webserver ?
Uptrenda
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I feel this is a perfect complement to the current 1. link: https://satproto.org/ which implements its own CA system with different trade-offs.