Advancing Standards for ZK and Provenance

The author argues that the web needs far more cryptographically signed data, so that signed content can be proven, selectively disclosed and used in zero-knowledge applications, and that the usual objections to signing are weak. The article says Eric Rescorla advised against signed TLS and suggested pushing signatures at the HTTPS layer, focusing on provenance and fake news, with a "Save as Certified" image option as a user story. It describes Google's SXG as stalled largely over CDN bandwidth revenue and Mozilla's opposition, and presents RFC 9421, a finalized standard already used by Amazon for inter-datacenter requests, as a better replacement for provenance.