Position Paper: Effective PKI Requires Effective HCI

PKI researchers keep producing applications that use publickey cryptography to enable human users (and service providers) to make effective trust judgments across organizational boundaries. However, too often, when we look closely, these judgments are unfounded; a moderately malicious adversary can often defeat the system. This position paper posits that this problem is endemic to current efforts that attempt to graft PKI onto pre-existing systems, while neglecting how humans perceive the “trusted activity” that is occurring. Effective PKI may require a fundamental reconsideration of these systems in terms of HCI.