• Asetru@feddit.org
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    1 day ago

    If you’re running a public service, you should have a key that’s trusted by a CA anyway. So why couldn’t you, especially for qr codes that link to an https site, embed a signature in that qr code that verifies that the person that owns parkyourcar.com’s private key also created the code you just scanned? Just like signed pdfs?

      • Caedarai@reddthat.com
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        15 hours ago

        Well, because it won’t be signed by a trusted CA for that task. Like if CAs had a category of certificate issuance that applied here (the standardisation issue) then it would be easy to spot a fake (which wouldn’t be correctly signed). Alternatively, you could take the European approach of having everything government related (like public street parking, though Europe mostly uses apps for that, not signed QR codes) rely on government entities and those in turn on a national set of government CAs.

        • Aux@feddit.uk
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          9 hours ago

          That doesn’t make any sense. How would you know if something should or should not be signed? You wouldn’t.

          • Caedarai@reddthat.com
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            3 hours ago

            If it becomes standard for public parking to be signed, everyone would know. If payment QR codes in general start being signed, your payment app might even know. Lastly there could even be signage by the code to help novices.

            • Aux@feddit.uk
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              3 hours ago

              The point of a code is to not have an app in the first place. Thus there’s no way to validate it.

              • Caedarai@reddthat.com
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                2 hours ago

                It wouldn’t need a separate app if, for instance, a standard QR payment format way created. If you just want a link to a website to pay, then naturally that would be less secure, but you could always put the URL below the QR code for redundancy (QR would only save time typing then).

          • Caedarai@reddthat.com
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            3 hours ago

            QR codes are mostly meant to let you get an amount of info (they’re mostly text-based) without having to type or enter it manually when you might make mistakes or when the process is just faster for the amount of text involved.