[tptacek]

Both of these statements can't possibly be true:

* PGP is only trustworthy if both parties treat key management with the utmost severity.

* Transparent key management systems that rely entirely on heuristics and click-through warnings are trustworthy.

[matthewdgreen]

Really they can both be true. They're just true for different constituencies. The vast majority of users are not targeted by active attacks, nor should they have reason to be. They may be hacked or subpoenaed after the fact.

[antihero]

I thought that "active" attacks is exactly what we were trying to guard against?

[michaelt]

Presumably the hope for transparent key management would be something like the CA system used in TLS, with certain reforms (certificate transparency? Namecoin?) which make it visible when a CA has been hacked or has collaborated with a global adversary.

So there's just a dozen or so central authorities who need to handle keys with the utmost severity.

[tptacek]

I'm baffled by that attitude (and CT, as well). So, you found out after the fact that the global adversary injected themselves in the middle of your conversation with a source. What do you do now? Move to an apartment in Russia?

Also the things that break transparently-keyed systems do so repeatedly. That's what transparent keying means: it's mediated by machines, and factored the slow, clumsy, human interactions out. CT? Audit logs? It's like Lucy and Charlie Brown with the football, except Lucy is hooked up to a for() loop.

[michaelt]

  So, you found out after the fact that the 
  global adversary injected themselves in 
  the middle of your conversation with a 
  source. What do you do now?

If you could reliably detect a CA issuing MITM certs to the global adversary, and if some unstoppable mechanism would respond to such detections by promptly dropping the CA's cert from clients' trust roots, and if being dropped from the trust roots put the CA out of business, then it would be extremely difficult to induce a CA to issue MITM certs.

[moreati]

What is CT in this context?

[croikle]

I believe it's Certificate Transparency, a Google project for globally monitoring SSL certificates.

http://www.certificate-transparency.org/