A proposal for the survival of the OpenPGP decentralized trust network
Gunnar Wolf, Jorge Luis Ortega-Arjona · 2022
While the most common transitive trust model for identity validation in use over Internet is the heavily centralized Public Key Infrastructure with Certification Authorities (PKI-CA) model, it is also possible to make use of a fully decentralized model: the Web of Trust (WoT). The best known implementation of this model is OpenPGP, derived from the original PGP software, first released in 1991. In order to be useful for a geographically-dispersed group of people, the WoT requires a keyserver network for key lookup and discovery — in a fittingly decentralized way.