CITP Luncheon Speaker Series: Muneeb Ali – Experiences with Building a Global PKI with Blockchains
Sherrerd Hall, 3rd floor open space Princeton, NJ, United StatesIn this talk, we describe our experience operating a large, real-world deployment of a decentralized PKI service built on top of the Namecoin blockchain. We present various challenges (network reliability, throughput, security issues) that we needed to overcome while registering/updating over 33,000 entries on the blockchain which involved over 200,000 transactions on the Namecoin network. Further, we discuss how our experience informed the design of a new blockchain-based naming system, Blockstack. We detail why we changed from Namecoin to the Bitcoin network for the new system, as well as operational lessons from this migration. Blockstack is released as open source and currently powers a production PKI system for 46,000 users.