[jsiepkes]

> Why can't we have this for the web?

How do you propose to scale trust on first use? SSH basically says the trusting of a key is "out of scope" for them and makes it your problem. As in: You can put on a piece of paper, tell it over the phone, whatever, but SSH isn't going to solve it for you. How is some user landing on a HTTPS site going to determine the key used is actually trustworthy?

There have actually been attempts at solving this with some thing like DANE [1]. For a brief period Chrome had DANE support but it was removed due to being too complicated and being in (security) critical components. Besides, since DNSSEC has some cracks in it (you local resolver probably doesn't check it) you can have a discussion about how secure DANE is.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS-based_Authentication_of_Na...

[DANmode]

So DNS-adjacent protocols are supposed to be handling this TOFU directory,

but industry behemoths are too busy pushing other self-serving standards to execute together on this?

Am I…close?

[tialaramex]

What "TOFU directory" ? The whole point of TOFU is that you're just going to accept that anybody's first claim of who they are is correct. This is going to often work pretty well, after all it's how a lot of our social relationships work. I was introduced to a woman as Nodis, so, I called her Nodis, everyone else I know calls her Nodis, her boyfriend calls her Nodis. But it turns out her employer and the government do not call her that because their paperwork has a legal name which she does not like - like many humans probably her legal name was chosen by her parents not by her.

Now, what if she'd insisted her name is Princess Charlotte. I mean, sure, OK, she's Princess Charlotte? But wait, my country has a Princess Charlotte, who is a little girl with some chance of becoming Queen one day (if her elder brother died or refused to be King). So if I just trusted that Nodis is Princess Charlotte because she said so, is there a problem?