Event details

Trust - the root of evil?!

von Alexander Bahlo (CAcert.org)

Saturday, 26.05.2012, Berlin II, 16:00-16:45 Uhr

In a highly connected world like ours is trust one of the most important assets. But what if the root to trust is not trustworthy?

2011 was the year where one Certificate Authority (CA) after the other came to fall. The cases of the Dutch DigiNotar and the Malaysian DigiCert are the best known. The system of commercial CAs depends on a wrong understanding of liability and trust. CAcert's web of trust tries to overcomes the liability issues by trusting a group of trusted people wherein each individual is liable for its own action.

This talk enlightens why most commercial CAs are not trustworthy by default, what we can learn from 2011's cases, what makes CAcert different, why CAcert is not in the browsers by default and what we do to make it happen.

Über den Autor Alexander Bahlo:

Alexander Bahlo's first experience with networks was in the 80's linked over serial lines. Now with Internet and always-on devices security is a big issue for everybody. To secure internet connections X.509 certificates are widely used, mostly issued by commercial certificate authorities.

CAcert strengthens the internet community by offering free certificates for everybody: Individual persons as well as organisations and companies. For doing so CAcert works with a web of trust and runs solely open source software.

Alexander Bahlo now helps the CAcert community as Officer for Public Relations.