Forced Perspectives

Abstract

The certificate authority (CA) PKI system has been used for decades as a means of providing domain identity verification services throughout the Internet, but a growing body of evidence suggests that our trust in this system is misplaced. A recently proposed CA alternative, Convergence, extends the Network Perspectives system of multi-path probing to perform certificate verification. Unfortunately, adoption of Convergence and other SSL/TLS trust enhancements has been slow, in part because it is unknown how these systems perform against large workloads and realistic conditions.