On Sat, 15 May 2004, Greg A. Woods wrote:

> I think end users also can intuitively understand the PGP web-of-trust
> because it's based on an even deeper, almost animal, basis for how it
> works in real life, _and_ we have an existing key server infrastructure.

I've implemented this with reasonably intelligent but crypto-naive
users, and I can say that these ones, at least, certainly did not have
an intuitive understanding of the web of trust.

I feel that X.509 certificates will be fine if we make sure that they
public keys for verifying the distributions themselves are broadly
published. We could do things such as have the install program suggest
that you go to several different sites and check the certificate
fingerprints published there against what it knows, which provides
fairly strong security at low cost. (All the sites would have to be
hacked in order to compromise this.)

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson  <cjs@cynic.net>   +81 90 7737 2974   http://www.NetBSD.org
    Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light.  --XTC