pki.sgit.ai: The Public Key Registry Has A Documented Failure To Learn From
Summary
The brief that scoped this site. It takes one historical lesson — the global keyserver network was destroyed in 2019 by a certificate-flooding attack its own maintainer called unsalvageable, and the cause was a stated design goal (never delete), not a bug — and turns it into the registry's design. The three abused properties become rules. The tension with the corpus's own append-only pattern is resolved precisely rather than by instinct: append-only is safe when the writer owns what it writes. Revocation becomes a signed append rather than a deletion. Identity and mandate separate into independently revocable signed statements. And the build order puts a private registry before a public one: testable versus commitment.
Key concepts
- The 2019 keyserver failure — ~150,000 garbage signatures on one key; unrepairable by design
- The ownership rule — append-only is a guarantee when writers own their records, an attack surface when anyone appends to another's
- The four registry rules — owner-only writes, revocation as signed append, size bounds, every entry signed
- Identity vs. mandate — who the key belongs to vs. what the agent may do, separately revocable
- Private before public — a registry with one organisation's agents is testable; a global one is a commitment
Key ideas
- Third-party attestations are what made the old system valuable and what made it attackable — the central design choice, to be made deliberately rather than inherited.
- Vaults supply distribution, safe mirroring and versioning; the ownership rule, size bound and signature checking are the registry logic still to build.
- Fractal trust structures require declared roots, or the graph is unevaluable.
- Lead with the failure page — the most linkable thing the site will have, and proof the design knew the history.
- 729 files mention the subject, so this is a curation problem rather than a research one.
On this site
Became the site: the failure page (build-order step 2), the four rules (step 3), identity and mandate (step 5, published as a concept ahead of the implementation), and the build order with its tensions and open questions carried across intact.