this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2025
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Even if you're using asymmetric cryptography, you still have to trust the insecure channel. If an attacker can replace the URL sent there with their own then they can have the sender encrypt the files with an attacker controlled public key rather than the legitimate one
This is the problem that digital signatures solve.
The difficulty is not with sharing the URL but with public key distribution, and that's why in PKI we have keyservers which associate public keys with identities (eg. email address), or certificate authorities that attest the association of identity and public key and establish a chain of trust.
A web app implementing this would play the role of the keyserver, and users would have some kind of userid that identifies them.
Sure, but then you've just shifted the problem up a level. Now I have to trust that the user id you provide me in the insecure channel really is you. Which means either trusting the insecure channel or trusting that the web app has confirmed who you are in some other way before giving you an ID.
We have to reject the first since we could skip all the asymmetric crypt and just send a symmetric key directly in the insecure channel.
If we're trusting the web app has confirmed your identity, we've moved from "just quickly go to this page and it'll generate you a public key" to "go to this site, upload a photo of your ID and a video of you saying that its you and whatever other verification is needed, then it'll give you a public key".
You originally wrote:
The hard part isn't them going to the site in advance, it's them establishing trust with the site that they are who they claim to be.