Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2013/841

Trust Views for the Web PKI

Johannes Braun, Florian Volk, Johannes Buchmann and Max Mühlhäuser

Abstract: The steadily growing number of certication authorities (CAs) assigned to the Web Public Key Infrastructure (Web PKI) and trusted by current browsers imposes severe security issues. Apart from being impossible for relying entities to assess whom they actually trust, the current binary trust model implemented with the Web PKI makes each CA a single point of failure. In this paper, we present the concept of trust views to manage variable trust levels for exactly those CAs actually required by a relying entity. This reduces the set of trusted CAs and minimizes the risk to rely on malicious certicates issued due to CA failures or compromises.

Category / Keywords: applications /

Date: received 12 Dec 2013

Contact author: jbraun at cdc informatik tu-darmstadt de

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20131216:194402 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2013/841

Discussion forum: Show discussion | Start new discussion