Universal Crypto Keychains
Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Thu, 08 Oct 2015 17:02:41 GMT
An idea crossed my mind this morning. I'm calling it "Universal Crypto Keychains". Those of us who use PGP (usually as GnuPG) are accustomed to having a keychain containing our private keys and the public keys of our correspondents. Wouldn't it be nice if that keychain gave you access to wifi routers and web sites. Instead of establishing a userid and password at a plethora of sites, you'd give them the public key corresponding to one of the private keys in your keychain.
I think this is what OpenID is supposed to be about, but I've seen very little adoption. The only web site I use that supports it is StartSSL.com, where I get my free web site SSL certificates (until Lets Encrypt takes off).
Why have people been so slow to adopt this? There's a WordPress plugin. There are libraries for PHP, Ruby, Python, .Net, Java, Erlang, Lisp, and I'm sure others.
