BSidesSF 2018

Which social factors are crucial for key signing ceremonies to build and maintain a chain of trust in the cryptographic operation and to establish credibility among the relying parties? Using Packet Clearing House’s DNSSEC key signing ceremonies as examples, this talk examines the process of selecting and vetting crypto officers and other individuals in trusted roles, the formal and informal hierarchies among the ceremony participants, and the formal separation of duties and privileges needed to secure the ceremony without entrusting too much control to any one actor. It then describes the functions of the informal networks and hierarchies among participants, how these facilitate coordination and social cohesion among the participants, and govern the distribution of trust and mutual control between human and nonhuman actors in the ceremony (HSM, code, etc.) Finally, the talk demonstrates how highly ritualized ceremony behavior, meticulously spelled out in a ceremony script, has less to do with achieving instrumental technical ends than with creating a context in which individual behavior transforms into social action, embodying trustworthiness of a cryptographic operation.