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BGP allows anyone to issue fake certs, so it does have a relationship to web PKI. And sure, if you have a couple billion dollars, you can set up fancy infrastr

BGP allows anyone to issue fake certs, so it does have a relationship to web PKI. And sure, if you have a couple billion dollars, you can set up fancy infrastructure and response teams to monitor the whole web (that you are aware of, that participate in CT) for a strangely-issued cert. Or you could just get a cert issued by the CA you normally use. In which case, now we have to track some kind of "customer number" per CA. If you use more than one CA (Google does) now you're tracking different customer numbers on different CAs. And all that has to be standardized. Most of these "fixes" for web PKI's glaring holes are intended for large multinational corporations, or are optional, or specific to a particular browser, and don't address the main concern: _do not trust an IP address to be who it claims to be_.

tialaramex 8y ago
No, you wouldn't use a "customer number". The usual approach taken for these genuinely concerned outfits goes like this: 1. Agree contractual terms with particular Certificate Authorities in which all certs for names in your hierarchy need explicit approval from your security people. 2. Set DNSSEC-secured CAA records for your names forbidding issuance by other Certificate Authorities. This funnels requests from hypothetical bad guys into your security people, which is exactly what they don't want. It loses you the shiny capability to do "spur of the moment" issuance, but presumably if you want these sort of terms the phrase "spur of the moment" causes you to start writhing and clutching your throat anyway. Insider threats will usually be much _worse_ than outsiders. As to things being "specific to a particular browser" we can't and don't want to be able to force, say, Microsoft and Apple to do things just because everybody else decided they're a good idea. The same with the trust store programmes. I can't make Microsoft take this seriously, but Microsoft can't make me use their SChannel and associated trust store. Maybe you have a lot more pull with Microsoft than I do. If we're in a world where the "easiest" way to get a bogus certificate is now to do global BGP hijack of an entire /24 then I think we're on the right track.

tialaramex 8y ago

No, you wouldn't use a "customer number". The usual approach taken for these genuinely concerned outfits goes like this: 1. Agree contractual terms with particular Certificate Authorities in which all certs for names in your hierarchy need explicit approval from your security people. 2. Set DNSSEC-secured CAA records for your names forbidding issuance by other Certificate Authorities. This funnels requests from hypothetical bad guys into your security people, which is exactly what they don't want. It loses you the shiny capability to do "spur of the moment" issuance, but presumably if you want these sort of terms the phrase "spur of the moment" causes you to start writhing and clutching your throat anyway. Insider threats will usually be much _worse_ than outsiders. As to things being "specific to a particular browser" we can't and don't want to be able to force, say, Microsoft and Apple to do things just because everybody else decided they're a good idea. The same with the trust store programmes. I can't make Microsoft take this seriously, but Microsoft can't make me use their SChannel and associated trust store. Maybe you have a lot more pull with Microsoft than I do. If we're in a world where the "easiest" way to get a bogus certificate is now to do global BGP hijack of an entire /24 then I think we're on the right track.