@@ -10,6 +10,8 @@ image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/pki-maze.png"
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13+A public key infrastructure (PKI) is a system for binding a set of keys to a name. Sometimes a small amount of metadata is included.
13Existing PKIs include PGP-style ["web of trust"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust), [SSL certificates](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_authority), [ZeroTier](https://www.zerotier.com/lf-announcement/), [Keybase](https://keybase.io/), [OpenID](https://openid.net/what-is-openid/), [Mozilla Persona](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Mozilla/Persona), and [Login with Google](https://developers.google.com/identity). These take unique approaches to the problem and have achieved some degree of success, but none provide globally consistent, permanent, and completely self-owned identities. Exhaustive exploration and categorization is unfortunately out of scope for this post, so we'll just describe Urbit's approach to achieving these properties in our PKI.
15Existing PKIs include PGP-style ["web of trust"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust), [SSL certificates](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_authority), [ZeroTier](https://www.zerotier.com/lf-announcement/), [Keybase](https://keybase.io/), [OpenID](https://openid.net/what-is-openid/), [Mozilla Persona](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Mozilla/Persona), and [Login with Google](https://developers.google.com/identity). These take unique approaches to the problem and have achieved some degree of success, but none provide globally consistent, permanent, and completely self-owned identities. Exhaustive exploration and categorization is unfortunately out of scope for this post, so we'll just describe Urbit's approach to achieving these properties in our PKI.
15In Urbit, a "name" is often called a "ship" or an "address" because we use the metadata in the PKI to make names routable. The total data is two 256-bit asymmetric keys, a cryptographic suite number (to allow changing crypto algorithms), the revision number of the key, and the name of a ship that will route for it. This sums to less than 128 bytes of data.
17In Urbit, a "name" is often called a "ship" or an "address" because we use the metadata in the PKI to make names routable. The total data is two 256-bit asymmetric keys, a cryptographic suite number (to allow changing crypto algorithms), the revision number of the key, and the name of a ship that will route for it. This sums to less than 128 bytes of data.