[OpenAFS] why kerberos only works in monolithic organizations

[Ken Hornstein]

>> In theory you don't need to encrypt the CA certificate, but you should
>> verify it's integrity somehow.  This is one of the places where PKI
>> tends to cheat; it works great in the usual case where web browsers have
>> a standard list of CAs that they accept.
>
>For values of great equal to "trusting a bunch of commercial CAs proven to
>be willing to hand out signed certificates to random people with only a
>minimum of identification."  I definitely would not trust, say, Verisign
>to do identity management properly.  They're more interested in making
>money.

I was trying to be nice ... but yes, I agree with you.  Perhaps "great"
is too strong.  So far, it seems that there haven't been too many
problems in the common "I'm want to be sure I'm actually visiting
https://www.paypal.com and not someone else" case ... if there was
someone who was handing out paypal/amazon/ebay certificates and they
were listed as a trusted CA in web browsers, people would be all over
them.  That one time Verisign gave out a Microsoft code-signing
certificate to some unknown person (I thought it was Verisign, but
maybe it wasn't ... it was one of the big names though), it was a huge
deal.  But before I trusted a Verisign-signed certificate, I'd want to
do some out-of-band verification that it belonged to who they said it
did ... and in that case, the person should just save their money and
give me their certificate directly to sign.  If there was a PKI I felt
I could trust, I'd feel differently.

--Ken