SSL Labs launches two Convergence notaries

Convergence is Moxie Marlinspike‘s attempt to introduce fresh thinking into the debate about PKI, certificate authorities, and trust. A hint of what was in the works was in a blog post published in April (SSL And The Future Of Authenticity); the project was launched at Black Hat US in August. Moxie’s talk was entertaining and insightful.

Moxie advertises the project as a way of dispensing with certificate authorities (“An agile, distributed, and secure strategy for replacing Certificate Authorities”). At the first glance that’s true. You get a browser add-on (only Firefox for the time being) that, once activated, completely replaces the existing CA infrastructure. Whenever you visit an SSL site your browser will talk to two or more remote parties (notaries) and ask them to check the site’s certificate for you. If they both see the same certificate you decide to trust the site.

But when you dig deeper into the project, you realise that it consists of two parts. The first, and more important, part is the ability to delegate trust decisions from your browser to another party that’s remote to you. That means that you are no longer forced to accept the decisions of the browser vendors, but you can make your own. That ability is, for me, the most thrilling aspect of the project.

The second part of the project is the current backend implementation that makes trust decisions. The approach is great in its simplicity: if you can see the same certificate from several different locations you conclude that it must be the correct certificate. We mustn’t rush, however. We’ve just been given the ability to choose whom to trust, and it’s too soon to settle on any one implementation. I am far more interested in experimenting with different approaches, to see what works and what does not.

To that end, it makes me very happy to announce that we (Qualys) have decided to support Convergence by financing and running two notary servers. While it’s not yet clear if Convergence can succeed (there are many technological and adoption challenges to conquer), we want to play a part in it and help it succeed.

Finally, here are the links to the notary servers (one of which is in the US and the other in Europe):

Note: To use the above links, you have to have the Convergence plugin installed. After that, all you need to do is click on the links and the notaries will become part of your configuration. Please report any problems to convergence-notary@qualys domain name.