[rubbsdecvik]

PGP would be a problem for high load servers too.

"Why not use public-key encryption for everything?

At face value, it seems that the existence of public-key encryption algorithms obsoletes all our previous secret-key encryption algorithms. We could just use public key encryption for everything, avoiding all the added complexity of having to do key agreement for our symmetric algorithms. By far the most important reason for this is performance. Compared to our speedy stream ciphers (native or otherwise), public-key encryption mechanisms are extremely slow. A single 2048-bit RSA encryption takes 0.29 megacycles, decryption takes a whopping 11.12 megacycles. To put this into comparison, symmetric key algorithms work in order of magnitude 10 or so cycles per byte in either direction. In order to encrypt or decrypt 2048 bytes, that means approximately 20 kilocycles."

https://www.crypto101.io/

EDIT: I suck at copy-pasta

[wmf]

I think the author is proposing to replace CAs with PGP-like web of trust but keep the rest of SSL/TLS the same, so public key crypto would only be used to setup a session key.

[rubbsdecvik]

That's fair. I re-read the article and see your point. I would still agree with other comments here that a WoT would be difficult to implement in a user friendly way that wouldn't also be exploited.

[zanny]

How is it hard for a browser vendor to implicitly trust itself, and build its WoT from there? Get Chrome, trust Google. Get Firefox, trust Mozilla. It means you have to trust your browser, but.. you kind of already have to do that, you are putting all your personal info through its text fields and such.