Public Key Infrastructure based on Authentication of Media Attestments

摘要

Many users would prefer the privacy of end-to-end encryption in their onlinecommunications if it can be done without significant inconvenience. However,because existing key distribution methods cannot be fully trusted enough forautomatic use, key management has remained a user problem. We propose afundamentally new approach to the key distribution problem by empoweringend-users with the capacity to independently verify the authenticity of publickeys using an additional media attestment. This permits client software toautomatically lookup public keys from a keyserver without trusting thekeyserver, because any attempted MITM attacks can be detected by end-users.Thus, our protocol is designed to enable a new breed of messaging clients withtrue end-to-end encryption built in, without the hassle of requiring users tomanually manage the public keys, that is verifiably secure against MITMattacks, and does not require trusting any third parties.