Security Through Transparency

The post mentioned the inadequacy of PGP. I would like to see a comparison with Keybase (https://keybase.io) which addresses similar problems.

> The relationship between online personas and public keys should be automatically verifiable and publicly auditable.

This description sure sounds like exactly what https://keybase.io provides.

The article links https://keytransparency.org/ which is currently just a pointer to https://github.com/google/key-transparency/ .

The blog is more 'why' while the repo is mostly 'how'.

In Certificate Transparency, a CA is responsible for sharing its issued certificates to CT. In Key Transparency, anyone can register a key for an email address; they just have to arrive first. Is there any provision for preventing squatting ?

Looking at the documentation in the repo, it sure looks to me like it's just a keyserver with a provable append-only model so you can audit every change. My cursory glance did not come up with any way to prove that the keys for a given account were actually added by someone with the authority to do so (there was even a screenshot showing that users could see when new unrecognized keys were added - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/google/key-transparency/ma... - which suggests that it relies on the user themselves to notice something going wrong).

The Design Overview does reference the fact that a user would have account credentials, and suggests that an attacker would have to compromise those credentials in order to change the keys on the user's account. So that's good. But that's still a single point of failure.

Compare this with keybase.io, where if an attacker compromises your account, they can't associate a new key with e.g. your twitter account thus tricking anyone who knows you over twitter into using your new key (they'd have to remove your twitter account from your profile in order to change the key). So keybase.io uses the variety of social networks as proof that your key really is owned by you, whereas Key Transparency seems to rely entirely on other people noticing via the key transparency history that the keys on the account all changed at some point (which doesn't necessarily even mean the account was compromised, it's possible the user did that deliberately because e.g. they lost control of their private key).

Note: I must repeat that I gave this only a cursory glance, and I didn't pay attention to some of the potentially-interesting properties here such as privacy protection. It's very plausible that Key Transparency does have valuable properties that keybase.io doesn't provide.