what is killing PKI?

Melvin Carvalho melvincarvalho at gmail.com
Fri Aug 24 21:21:47 CEST 2012


On 24 August 2012 14:24, <peter.segment at wronghead.com> wrote:

> On 23/08/12 17:07, Robert J. Hansen - rjh at sixdemonbag.org wrote:
>
>>
>> Deploying PKI is nowhere near as big of a problem as convincing people
>> that PKI adds benefit to their lives.
>>
>
> and
>
>  Right now the number one thing killing PKI is the fact nobody wants to
>> adopt it.  If you state, "well, before someone can use PKI they must
>> understand the underlying concepts," you're automatically selecting for
>> the upper 1% of computer users.
>>
>>
> I propose to you (and to the people who are putting all that hard work
> into gpg) that there are actually two "things killing PKI":
>
> 1) Very, very few people are motivated to protect their communication
> by encrypting it, and at the same time advertise that motivation
> urbi et orbi  by participating in the PKI/WOT.
>
> 2) Very, very few people have a need to encrypt the communication
> to someone they have not been in contact with in "real life" (where
> the public key fingerprint can be verified in person. Remember how
> Phil Zimmermann suggested printing the public key fingerprint
> on your business card? I used to do just that. For my public
> key, available on my personal, controlled-access web-page.
> Long time ago. Before the Good Lord invented key-servers, serving
> my email address and my identity to whoever happens to trot by :)
>
> PKI/WOT solves a minuscule problem (verifyng the key of someone you
> have not met before but have a need to communicate with in secret)
> at a humongous cost of software complexity and need for user
> comprehension completely beyond the motivation and the ability of
> "the other 99%" you mention.
>

I think PKI needs to become a deeply integrated web experience to move to
the next level.

Much in the same way the email was integrated into the web with products
such as GMail.

GPG has roughly 10 million users in 10 years?

The Web has been known to deliver 100 million users in a month.

Just my 2 cents.


>
> Peter M.
>
>
>
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