Somewhat amusing paper on decentralized[laff] PKI
From MIT/eprint (PDF):
"Public key infrastructures (PKIs) enable users to look up and verify one another’s public
keys based on identities. Current approaches to PKIs are vulnerable because they do not offer
sufficiently strong guarantees of identity retention; that is, they do not effectively prevent one
user from registering a public key under another’s already-registered identity. In this paper, we
leverage the consistency guarantees provided by cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Namecoin
to build a PKI that ensures identity retention. Our system, called Certcoin, has no central
authority and thus requires the use of secure distributed dictionary data structures to provide
efficient support for key lookup."
..of course they had to give it a coin name - derps
