[p2p-hackers] RE: P2P Authentication

[Paul Lambert]

> >   Traditional public key signing doesn't work well if you want to 
> > eliminate the central authority / trusted third party.  If you like 
> > keeping those around, then yes, absolutely, traditional PKI works 
> > swimmingly.
> 
> Where is the evidence of this bit about "traditional PKI 
> working"?  As far as I've observed, traditional PKI works 
> barely for small, highly centralized, hierarchical 
> organizations and not at all for anything else.  Am I missing 
> some case studies of PKI actually working as intended?
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Zooko


I'm not a big fan anymore of x.509 ... but with difficulty it does work.
There are very large Government installations, MS code signing uses PKI,
TLS and browsers use PKI (but poorly).

P2P systems, at least 'Real P2P'(tm), has no use for a single central
authority.  Having every peer maintain their own trust hierarchy  is
viable.  It's the forest model versus a single tree model.

Paul