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If it were possible to:

1) Synchronise the certificates automatically between every computer in the world;

2) Change user; and

3) Create multiple identities,

I think this would indeed be used on a huge scale already. Traditional accounts do all of this: you can log in to your Gmail account from any computer in the world. You can sign out of your Gmail account and sign in with a different user. If you are feeling paranoid or scared about having no backup Gmail address, you can create a secondary account.

Now you are probably able to use multiple certificates and maybe switch between them, but none of this has been made user-friendly. So that is the crux, browser builders (Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, and--a bit later on--Google) just didn't pick this up.

Still though, the first problem would remain. But don't I remember entering a password for my self-signed SSL certificate which I created for my Apache webserver? Couldn't you do something like that and generate a certificate based on a password? Like signing up for a website, only on browser level and for every website at the same time?

Maybe there is actually future in this after all. This sounds good to me at least!




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