pki.sgit.ai: The Public Key Registry Has A Documented Failure To Learn From
Summary
Scopes pki.sgit.ai — a site and a registry of agent keys — from one historical lesson: the global keyserver network was destroyed in 2019 by a certificate-flooding attack its own maintainer called unsalvageable, and the cause was a stated design goal (never delete), not a bug. The brief turns the three abused properties into registry rules, resolves the tension with the corpus's own append-only pattern precisely (append-only is safe when the writer owns what it writes), makes revocation a signed append rather than a deletion, and separates identity from mandate as independently revocable signed statements. Private registry before public: testable versus commitment.
Key concepts
- The 2019 keyserver failure — ~150,000 garbage signatures on one key; unrepairable by design
- The ownership rule — append-only is a guarantee when writers own their records, an attack surface when anyone appends to another's
- The four registry rules — owner-only writes, revocation as signed append, size bounds, every entry signed
- Identity vs. mandate — who the key belongs to vs. what the agent may do — separately revocable
Key ideas
- Third-party attestations are what made the old system valuable and what made it attackable — the central design choice, to be made deliberately.
- Vaults supply distribution, safe mirroring and versioning; the ownership rule, size bound and signature checking are the registry logic still to build.
- Fractal trust structures require declared roots, or the graph is unevaluable.
- Lead with the failure page — the most linkable thing the site will have, and proof the design knew the history.
On this site
Became the PKI section: the hub, the keyserver-failure page, and the registry-rules page.