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Firefox ships with a bunch of trusted root authority certificates. If I understand how certificates work correctly, essentially what this means is that any cer

Firefox ships with a bunch of trusted root authority certificates. If I understand how certificates work correctly, essentially what this means is that any certificate that is signed by these root certificates is automatically trusted by your Firefox browser. The implication, and what makes this scary, is that if this were done with malevolent intentions, there could be a whole host of sites out there that had "bogus" certificates that Firefox would think were fine because they were signed by this trusted authority. Just as an aside, you can always see the certificate chain in Firefox by clicking on the favicon area when a certificate is in use (i.e. when using https), clicking on "More Information", clicking "View Certificate", and going to the "Details" tab. You can then see the "Certificate Hierarchy". This shows you all the certificates in the chain, and who signed what. At the very top should be the "root authority"; this is usually someone like Verisign. To bring this whole thing around, then, on some sites, you could see the root authority as the certificate mentioned in the post. I guess, finally, I should point out, like others have, that this doesn't really mean anything bad is going on; the certificate could be perfectly valid. However, it is at least a little worrisome that they aren't sure where it came from.

rbanffy 17y ago
> The implication, and what makes this scary You can always remove certificates from CAs you don't trust. If you don't trust Verisign, how can you tell Amazon is really Amazon?
- jerf 17y ago
  Once you, the user, are removing root certificates from your browser, the trust system has failed. Especially since while you and I may understand the full implications of such an action, "you the user" in general can not. The entire point of the trust system was to remove the need for the generic end-user to make such decisions, and if it fails that, it fails everything. Moreover, even as a sophisticated user, I have to observe that I actually do not trust a single root certificate in my browser the requisite 100% that is necessary for this whole system to work. I can not assign a 0% probability to any of them being compromised by a hostile force, especially when the hostile force isn't necessary a random hacker but may be a sovereign government. So, while your point is totally correct, it should be pointed out it isn't really a defense of the current system. (Which you may not have intended it as, but I have seen others use it this way and it's worth pointing out.)
  - rbanffy 17y ago
    One cannot be 100% sure a CA isn't compromised by a robot coming from the future. You don't have to 100% trust a CA, but you have to know how much trust you'll give to the whole system. Right now, I won't trust it that much.
    - jerf 17y ago
      That's not the way in which the system is structured for 100% trust. The problem is that the system as a whole produces a binary answer: "Yes, this site has passed your trust chain" and "No, it has not." There's no room for dodgy certs, and certainly no room for dodgy root CAs. Further, there's no room for decreasing my trust in a cert based on the length of the chain, or who's on the chain, or anything like that. The whole system is structured to produce a 100% certification of trust, or a 0% certification of trust. This has the consequence that when the system is compromised in the way that you talk about in your last paragraph, it doesn't degrade; it falls apart. It's not that robots from the future might compromise a cert, and going to something so fantastic in the light of the real threat of sovereign governments and the proved threat of compromised root CA certs (proved as in "you could buy this device for real money and have it really delivered to you") is a rhetorical unkindness. It is that nobody can any longer claim with a straight face that the system is 100%, and unfortunately, with SSL that leaves only one alternative. Compare with the semi-mythical "web of trust", which would have ways of dealing with this that doesn't violate the very mathematical foundations of the system.

rbanffy 17y ago

> The implication, and what makes this scary You can always remove certificates from CAs you don't trust. If you don't trust Verisign, how can you tell Amazon is really Amazon?

jerf 17y ago
Once you, the user, are removing root certificates from your browser, the trust system has failed. Especially since while you and I may understand the full implications of such an action, "you the user" in general can not. The entire point of the trust system was to remove the need for the generic end-user to make such decisions, and if it fails that, it fails everything. Moreover, even as a sophisticated user, I have to observe that I actually do not trust a single root certificate in my browser the requisite 100% that is necessary for this whole system to work. I can not assign a 0% probability to any of them being compromised by a hostile force, especially when the hostile force isn't necessary a random hacker but may be a sovereign government. So, while your point is totally correct, it should be pointed out it isn't really a defense of the current system. (Which you may not have intended it as, but I have seen others use it this way and it's worth pointing out.)
- rbanffy 17y ago
  One cannot be 100% sure a CA isn't compromised by a robot coming from the future. You don't have to 100% trust a CA, but you have to know how much trust you'll give to the whole system. Right now, I won't trust it that much.
  - jerf 17y ago
    That's not the way in which the system is structured for 100% trust. The problem is that the system as a whole produces a binary answer: "Yes, this site has passed your trust chain" and "No, it has not." There's no room for dodgy certs, and certainly no room for dodgy root CAs. Further, there's no room for decreasing my trust in a cert based on the length of the chain, or who's on the chain, or anything like that. The whole system is structured to produce a 100% certification of trust, or a 0% certification of trust. This has the consequence that when the system is compromised in the way that you talk about in your last paragraph, it doesn't degrade; it falls apart. It's not that robots from the future might compromise a cert, and going to something so fantastic in the light of the real threat of sovereign governments and the proved threat of compromised root CA certs (proved as in "you could buy this device for real money and have it really delivered to you") is a rhetorical unkindness. It is that nobody can any longer claim with a straight face that the system is 100%, and unfortunately, with SSL that leaves only one alternative. Compare with the semi-mythical "web of trust", which would have ways of dealing with this that doesn't violate the very mathematical foundations of the system.