Improving Message Security With a Self-Assembling PKI _

Public key infrastructures (PKIs) exist for a number of purposes. One purpose is achieving widespread deployment of secure communication; the PKI makes it easy for two parties to communicate securely. Another purpose is that of secure delivery to a recipient; the PKI makes sure that when Alice sends a message to Bob, it arrives to the very Bob for whom Alice intended it. This white paper describes a Self-Assembling-PKI, a new way of constructing the corpus of certificates that makes up a PKI with an approach to the first goal – widespread deployment of secure communication. It does not address the second goal, but can use and interoperate with a PKI designed to achieve it. It creates itself by observing and monitoring existing message traffic and transparently inserting security protocols into existing traffic. Most radically, its mechanisms trade perfect security for ubiquity.