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I've been thinking about OpenPGP based website authentication too. You should check out the web pages I have book marked under the "gpg" tag: http://delicious.com/jf/gpg

My main frustration right now is that, aside from Bouncy Castle, all the libraries I've looked at to do cryptography seem to just be partially implemented wrappers around GnuPG.

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actually it is possible already to set up certificates and use them for authentication, in firefox you can check this under preferences/advanced/encryption

I really like client-side SSL certificates, I just hate dealing with custom root certificates. I'm excited about using the OpenPGP web-of-trust to add a "social" layer to applications. For example: "Allow any of my friends to log in to this server".

My main inspiration of thought along these lines is the urge to want to post things like photos online for friends/family, but I shy away from using something like Facebook to do it. The only problem with 'rolling my own' is the I don't want to necessarily make all photos world-viewable, and I don't want to force my friends/family to create an account just to view my photos.

If all I had to do was grab their public key, I could then do everything behind the scenes (even creating groups so that some people can see some photos and others can't).

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