Re: X509 and Verificable Creds: A Quick Note on WebID history - Re: All the Agents Challenge (ATAC) at ISWC 2021

On Sun, 25 Jul 2021 at 23:24, Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net> wrote:

>
>
> > On 25. Jul 2021, at 21:37, Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > On 7/24/21 3:44 PM, Henry Story wrote:
> >>
> >> A proof is that it took 10 years to get to the point where credentials
> >> could replace X509 certificates, and it is actually not quite there yet,
> >> as we need RDF canonicalization, which will take another 3 years.
> >
> >
> > Hi Henry,
> >
> > Why is X.509 Certificate replacement important? Personally, I've always
> > felt its ubiquity enables one solve Identity challenges by simply
> > hooking in the magical powers of resolvable URIs.
>
> Indeed the extremely wide deployment of X509 is its major advantage.
> That is why we used it with WebID-TLS. Every browser from around 1999
> had a built in keystore for X509 certificates tied to TLS that allowed
> client authentication.  The wide deployment of this technology with
> the hope it could potentially be improved, led me to be very enthusiastic
> about using it. WebID-TLS was a clever logical hack on that deployed
> foundation
> to allow us to create decentralised social networks.
>
> One problem of X509 was that it was built on ASN.1 which is pre-web binary
> format. It’s an EAV format where relations are named by numbers, with no
> semantics and only belatedly a central registrar for registering these
> numbers.
> https://www.alvestrand.no/objectid/
> The gap between that and both JSON-LD, Turtle or any other RDF tech is
> huge.
> Indeed the heated debates between RDF formats are just storms in some
> folks’ teacups,
> in comparison.
>
>
> An RDF based certificate format based on linked data is compared to ASN1
> something
> like a 40 year technology jump forward. It’s a huge step. 12 years ago it
> was a
> 28 year step forward. As was predictable, replacing something like ASN.1
> with
> a RDF tech was a huge undertaking. It required not just replacing a binary
> format
> with a linked data one, but also building new keystores, developing
> ontologies,
> and a lot more…
>

Sorry, couldnt sleep thinking about this.  Why does the leap get smaller as
you go back in time?


>
> Another problem with X509 and TLS is that TLS is at a layer below the HTTP
> stack,
> and even though some folks at Mozilla have been trying to link these
> together I think
> those have failed. Otherwise it would potentially be possible to use VCs as
> client side TLS replacements. But I think with HTTP Sig one can actually
> get a much
> simpler solution at the same layer as HTTP.
>
> What may go a lot further would be the deployment of P2P extensions to
> HTTP.
> https://github.com/w3c/architecture/issues/14
>
> Henry Story
> https://twitter.com/bblfish
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