In the past few years, various studies have investigated the implementation of Blockchain technology in several aspects of the security of the internet. The recently published study reveals that several cybersecurity companies, industries, and sectors offer the influence of Blockchain technology in the service development with the importance of certificate authorities and the context of critical infrastructure. Further, it reveals that an increased magnitude of studies was examining into blockchains to evaluate the impact on blockchains on promoting cybersecurity and create a state of “cyber peace.”
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Hazards of Certificate Authorities:
Certificate authorities are third parties which the webmasters and online companies refer it to identify the organisations and balance their identities with their similar public cryptographic keys. It will help the users to trust that a given public key corresponds to the appropriate party. Due to several reasons, certificate authorities can be untrustworthy. The companies like Google and Mozilla have trusted some certificate authorities even though they can lie about identifiers of the user or it can be hacked. For example, at the first half of 2011, nearly 200 various certificate authorities successfully fulfilled the Mozilla’s certificate policies. At the second part of 2011, the fraudulent documents were received from the comodo’s servers which are a public license for entities like Yahoo and Gmail by an Iranian hacker.
Using the Blockchain Technology to Strengthen the Security of Certificate Authorities:
The main problem associated with certificate authorities is issuing certificates that link identities of real people of digital cryptographic keys. For example, Turkish certificate authorities issued the certificates which related identity to cryptographic keys of individuals who don’t belong it. It leads to users connecting to the websites which they thought that was Google, but it was third parties. One can check which certificate authority signed the given certificate. But it is not done as it takes a lot of time even by the most experienced professionals. Blockchain technology will provide a solution to address the issue of accidental issuance of certificates as it represents the immutable public ledger.
Instead of depending on untrustworthy third parties, organisations and users certificates need to be inserted onto the public ledger. Blockchains enables the users to broadcast their certificate without going through the validation by a certificate authority. Further, certificates will also have long life span by using blockchain technology. When a user of a given certificate trusts that it is legitimate, it can deploy the computational power through mining. For example, when a user connects to Flipkart through their browser, it utilises some computational power to verify the Flipkart’s certificate. The certificates which are long-lived and frequently used will be considered more trustworthy than the newly issued certificates.
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For well reputable brands, it will rather hard to create new reliable certificates as they have to build their history, but the problem of sharing the trust transitively across various certificates will mitigate. On the other side, the users will be notified to take the appropriate precautions whenever a certificate’s identity is newly minted. The blockchain technology will strength the security of certificate authorities even though there is various security need scheme to fulfil. Within few years, we can expect more development in this sector as the students at MIT are working and experimenting very hard in this field.
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