Convergence claims to be an agile, secure, and distributed strategy for replacing SSL Certificate Authorities

Certificate authority

In cryptography, a certificate authority, or certification authority, is an entity that issues digital certificates. The digital certificate certifies the ownership of a public key by the named subject of the certificate...

. Moxie Marlinspike

Moxie Marlinspike

Moxie Marlinspike is a computer security researcher. He has discovered several high-profile computer-related security problems, is well known for work with both secure protocols and Android, and is the author of the sailing film Hold Fast....

 released it in August 2011 while giving a talk titled "SSL And The Future Of Authenticity" on stage at the BlackHat security conference. It is currently a Firefox addon and a server-side notary daemon.

In the talk, Moxie Marlinspike

Moxie Marlinspike

Moxie Marlinspike is a computer security researcher. He has discovered several high-profile computer-related security problems, is well known for work with both secure protocols and Android, and is the author of the sailing film Hold Fast....

 proposes that all of the current problems with the CA system can be reduced to a single missing property, called "Trust Agility," which Convergence is designed to provide.

Background

Convergence is based on previous work from the Perspectives Project at Carnegie Mellon University. Like Perspectives, Convergence authenticates connections by contacting external notaries, but unlike Perspectives, Convergence notaries can use a number of different strategies beyond network perspective in order to reach a verdict.

External links

• http://www.convergence.io - Convergence website.
• https://github.com/moxie0/Convergence - Convergence project page.