Year: 2006
Type: report
Abstract: A Certication Authority (CA) can be used to certify keys and build a public-key infrastructure (PKI) when all users trust the same CA. A decentralized PKI trades off absolute assurance on keys for independence from central control and improved scalability and robustness. The PGP web of trust model has been suggested as a decentralized certication system, and has been used with great success for secure email. Although the PGP web of trust model allows anyone to issue certicates which can be used to form certicate chains, the discovery and construction of certicate chains relies on centralized keyservers to store certicates and respond to queries. In this paper, we design and implement KeyChains, a peer-to-peer system which incorporates a novel lookup mechanism specically tailored to the task of generating and retrieving certicate chains in completely unstructured networks. By layering our system on top of the web of trust model, we thus obtain the rst PKI which is truly decentralized in all respects. Our analysis and simulations show that the resulting system is both efcient and secure. 1
Authors: Ruggero Morselli, Bobby Bhattacharjee, Jonathan Katz, Michael Marsh
Language: English
Subfield: Computer Networks and Communications
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W197945297