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Can Security Be Decentralised?

The Case of the PGP Web of Trust

  • Conference paper
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Socio-Technical Aspects in Security (STAST 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13176))

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Abstract

The PGP Web of Trust was intended to provide a decentralised trust model for digital security, an alternative to centralised security models that might be subject to government control. Drawing from five years of ethnographic research among cybersecurity engineers into the everyday practice of using the Web of Trust, I critically examine the relationship between security and trust in distributed computing systems. I employ sociological perspectives on trust to examine the distinct roles that decentralised interpersonal trust and centralised assurance structures play in ensuring security in the Web of Trust. I illustrate how the Web of Trust, although designed to evade government control, paradoxically relies upon assurances provided by government-issued documents to validate identity, even while also relying upon interpersonal trust for this purpose. Through my analysis, I offer a framework for thinking about the relationship between centralisation and decentralisation, and between trust and assurance, to ensure security in the design and operation of distributed computing systems.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I draw this statistic from the Ubuntu keyserver: https://keyserver.ubuntu.com/pks/lookup?op=stats.

  2. 2.

    FIRST and M3AAWG are key global cybersecurity organisations with distinct, but overlapping, missions that facilitate coordination among government and private sector cybersecurity incident response and security teams. For more information, see https://www.first.org/ and https://www.m3aawg.org/.

  3. 3.

    An alternative history suggests that public key cryptography was invented earlier at the UK’s GCHQ, but remained classified [43].

  4. 4.

    In practice, a shortened version of the message - a unique fingerprint or “hash” - is used in signatures to save on the computation required to encrypt and decrypt large messages for the purposes of authentication.

  5. 5.

    For more information, see https://www.openpgp.org/.

  6. 6.

    For a broader survey of attacks against PGP, see [25].

  7. 7.

    The OpenPGP standard provides for finer grained trust levels, from 0 to 255 [10]. However, the levels indicated here are those used in practice in OpenPGP implementations.

  8. 8.

    See the GnuPG manual for a more detailed explanation: https://gnupg.org/gph/en/manual.html#AEN335.

  9. 9.

    I do not discuss the case of contacts with trust level none, regarded as untrustworthy to sign keys. While this exceptional condition is important, my focus is on mechanisms through which connections are created, rather than explicitly rejected.

  10. 10.

    As usability studies of PGP tools have indicated [41, 47], I was far from alone in my confusion.

  11. 11.

    The organiser of the FIRST key signing party recommended this document for guidance on different ways in key signing parties may be run: https://www.cryptnet.net/fdp/crypto/keysigning_party/en/keysigning_party.html.

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  1. King’s College London, London, UK

    Ashwin J. Mathew

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  1. Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Simon Parkin

  2. King's College London, London, UK

    Luca Viganò

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Mathew, A.J. (2022). Can Security Be Decentralised?. In: Parkin, S., Viganò, L. (eds) Socio-Technical Aspects in Security. STAST 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13176. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10183-0_4

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