Community generated trust

I like CAcert.org. The basic premise of this CA is that trust is a community effort: the "by the people, for the people" kind of stuff. A social network for security geeks. Trust in derived identities (not identities of persons but identity of domain names or of Web servers) can then in principle be based on community generated trust so that steep yearly prices for server certificates can be avoided. We all benefit (except if you run a commercial CA, of course).

I created my CAcert account ages ago, but only recently undertook some action to get my identity assured by the community. Here's how it works:

• You create an account with the service and register one or more email addresses.
• The service checks possession of each email address by sending a challenge link to click.
• You can also register domain names (where you typically host Web servers) with the service, possession of the domain is checked in a similar way.
• As a user you now have 0 points
  • You can have the service issue email certificates for your email addresses (for sending encrypted or signed emails, or for client side TLS authentication).
    
  • You can have the service issue Web server certificates for your domains (for server side TLS authentication, i.e. HTTPS).
    
  • Issued certificates (based on a CSR that you generate) are valid for 6 months and contain only basic information (not your full name, for instance).
• Once you have over 50 points, newly issued certificates will be valid for 2 years and can contain your full name.
• Once you have over 100 points, you can also have the service issue code signing certificates and you become a so-called assurer (after you take the official online exam).
  
• Certificates are signed by the service's root private key and can be checked using the service's root certificate (at the time of writing that certificate is valid until 2033). Currently viewers of your TLS secured Web site will have to manually insert the root certificate into their browser's trust store. The ambition of CAcert is to have the service's root certificate included in Mozilla's trust store distributed with Firefox.

How do you get more points? You will need to find an assurer (another user with over 100 points) and meet with him or her face-to-face. The assurer will check you passport (or driver's license or similar photo ID) according to certain guidelines and fill out a paper form which you need to sign. Depending on the experience of the assurer, he or she can give you 10 to 35 points maximum. The form is kept by the assurer for seven years and then destroyed. The service's Web site has a database that can be queried to find assurers near your location. I used this mechanism over the last couple of weeks to find some friendly people in Twente willing to check my identity (thanks Peter, Ashwin, Tom, Alex & Stephan).

So how trustworthy is all of this, really? The foundation behind the CAcert is a non-profit organization being supported by other non-profits. They seem serious about their infrastructure's security. The server side software is open source, and although it is written in PHP and Perl, it can be inspected by security researchers. For cryptography the implementation relies on OpenSSL. There's a whole community effort to train assurers in recognizing authentic government issued IDs. That all sounds pretty trustworthy (except maybe for the use of OpenSSL, which is written by monkeys ;) ).

Let's say I want a fake identity assured (i.e., a freshly generated free-mail account with a fake name and date of birth with 100 points). How difficult is that? I'll assume that until now all other users have been honest and have been perfectly assured based on government issued IDs. I'll need to find n evil assurers (at most ten). Those evil assurers should be willing to falsely assure my fake identity. Do those n assurers need to be n different people? Maybe not: creating ten different accounts under my real name is possible (the service should be available to users which happen to have the same name and date of birth as an existing user). I could get those ten accounts assured by at most (n * (n + 1)) / 2 honest assurers so that each account gets 100 points. I then use those ten accounts to give my fake account 100 points. Better yet, I create ten fake accounts this way and give each of those 100 points so that I no longer need my ten original accounts (which are all in my real name, better delete those now).

How to remedy this? There seems to be an audit program in place, where assurers are asked to contact other assurers to sanity-check past assurances. Eventually my fraudulent accounts will be discovered and traced back to my real identity (the ten accounts in my real name that were assured by honest assurers). I could then be held to the community agreement which I agreed to when I signed up for the service. The combination of government issued ID, face-to-face meetings, community vigilance, and legal agreements actually forms a pretty good deterrent security control against the described attack. In the end what CAcert is doing is not so different from what the commercial CAs are doing.

Update 2010/02/17: Looks like this same meme was recently discussed on the CAcert mailing list.