Limitations of Web of Trust
Below are some limitations of the Web of Trust
- Vulnerable to Attacks: If you lose your private keys, you won’t be able to access your certificates or verify others. If your keys are stolen, hacked, or forged, whoever possesses them can take on you and damage your reputation.
- Requires Active Participation: You have to save your keys and certificates and sign the certifications of others, which can be laborious and time-consuming.
- Privacy Concerns: You can accidentally reveal important data when you create or sign certificates. Remember that certificates include information about your identity and credentials, such as your name and public key are important.
What is Web of Trust?
Web of Trust in cryptography is a concept used in PGP, GnuPG, and other OpenPGP-compatible systems to verify the legitimacy of 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 is entirely dependent on a certificate authority (or a hierarchy of them). As with computer networks, there are several separate webs of trust, and any user (via their public key certificate) can participate in and connect multiple webs.