For the internet security website, see WOT Services.
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Schematic diagram of a Web of Trust
In cryptography, a web of trust is a concept used in PGP, GnuPG, and other OpenPGP-compatible systems to establish the authenticity of the binding between a public key and its owner. Its decentralized trust model is an alternative to the centralized trust model of a public key infrastructure (PKI), which relies exclusively on a certificate authority (or a hierarchy of such).[1] As with computer networks, there are many independent webs of trust, and any user (through their public key certificate) can be a part of, and a link between, multiple webs.
The web of trust concept was first put forth by PGP creator Phil Zimmermann in 1992 in the manual for PGP version 2.0:
As time goes on, you will accumulate keys from other people that you may want to designate as trusted introducers. Everyone else will each choose their own trusted introducers. And everyone will gradually accumulate and distribute with their key a collection of certifying signatures from other people, with the expectation that anyone receiving it will trust at least one or two of the signatures. This will cause the emergence of a decentralized fault-tolerant web of confidence for all public keys.
Note the use of the word emergence in this context. The web of trust makes use of the concept of emergence.
^Chien, Hung-Yu (2021-08-19). "Dynamic Public Key Certificates with Forward Secrecy". Electronics. 10 (16): 2009. doi:10.3390/electronics10162009. ISSN 2079-9292.
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certificates, as a trusted introducer. If the "weboftrust" is completely trusted then, because of the nature of a weboftrust, trusting one certificate...
enforce a security policy Weboftrust, a system used in cryptography to establish authenticity WOT Services or Weboftrust, a crowdsourced Internet website...
built-in list of self-signed root certificates to act as trust anchors for applications. The Firefox web browser also provides its own list oftrust anchors...
e-mail address. The first version of this system was generally known as a weboftrust to contrast with the X.509 system, which uses a hierarchical approach...
Gossamer Spider WebofTrust ("GSWoT"; a grass-roots OpenPGP PKI) for safe-keeping in hopes to increase the longevity of their earned trust points. The collaborative...
authority or a member of a weboftrust which describes their practice for issuing and managing public key certificates. Some elements of a CPS include documenting...
blogging, a generic weboftrust for decentralized spam resistance, Shoeshop for using Freenet over sneakernet, and many more. The origin of Freenet can be...
The dark web forms a small part of the deep web, the part of the web not indexed by web search engines, although sometimes the term deep web is mistakenly...
by assorted certificate authorities. At the other end of the conceptual range is the weboftrust system, which avoids central Certificate Authorities...
trusted by web browser creators to provide valid certificates. Therefore, a user should trust an HTTPS connection to a website if and only if all of the...
developer of MyWOT (also known as WOT and WebofTrust), an online reputation and Internet safety service which shows indicators oftrust about existing...
charges customers a fee to issue certificates for them. By contrast, in a weboftrust scheme, individuals sign each other's keys directly, in a format that...
certificate chains for a description of these concepts in a widely used standard for digital certificates. Root oftrustWeboftrust "How Certificate Chains Work"...
without the complex procedure of obtaining a personal certificate which are vulnerable to CA Compromise. Compared to WebofTrust, TOFU has less maintenance...
authority, but to a distributed weboftrust approach. Key signing parties are a way to strengthen the weboftrust. Participants at a key signing party...
a trust metric is a measurement or metric of the degree to which one social actor (an individual or a group) trusts another social actor. Trust metrics...
created a partnership with WebofTrust to help fight the war on viruses. Panda was previously embroiled in a lawsuit with one of its channel partners, External...
World Wide Web. Another common use is in issuing identity cards by national governments for use in electronically signing documents. Trusted certificates...
does not compromise the anonymity of the system. A variation of the public key cryptography system is a Weboftrust, where each user has both a public...
signee. This enables someone who trusts the signer to extend her trust to the signee as well. In this way, a weboftrust is built. PGP users often organize...
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