Abstract

Abstract: The Certificate Authority (CA) system, added as an afterthought in the mid-1990s during initial development of SSL , has become a critical component for security on the web. Its faults have been become painfully clear over the past 2 years, with at least four known CA compromises which have enabled eavesdropping of real user’s web traffic with grave consequences. This talk will survey the growing menagerie of proposals patching the CA system to mitigate such failures, including HPKP , Certificate Transparency, DANE , TACK, Perspectives, and s-links. It will lay out the challenges inherent in any attempt to efficiently and securely distribute security policy on a global scale and compare several potential combinations of protocols which could be paths forward.

Bio: Joseph Bonneau is an engineer at Google New York. He completed his PhD in 2012 at the Security Group in Cambridge under Ross Anderson on human authentication.