DeCERT: A Decentralized Certificate Authority

DeCert demonstrates a decentralized way to provision certificates to websites and a way for clients to trust or not trust them based on crowd-sourced input. At the moment, it is very difficult to revoke individual certificates and it is easy for fraudulent actors to get certificates. Lets Encrypt has made it possible for websites to quickly and easily get a certificate, however this rapid provisioning of certificates means that mistakes will be made and certificates will need to be revoked. DeCert makes this possible using the Etherium blockchain to store a public record of all valid certificates as well as include a record of votes for or against each certificate. This allows users to vote on whether or not a certificate should be trusted. The basic idea with voting is that votes could be paid for in Etherium, however it is acknowledged that this voting system could be improved to avoid malicious actors from validating a bad certificate or invalidating a good one. Users would be able to see the votes on any given certificate, and decide to trust or not trust a given certificate. This project serves as a proof of concept, as it would rely on a change to users browsers to be able to fetch certificates properly and many honest users to participate in voting.