I'll chime in on this.. Some buddies and I have been debating this since the comodo stuff first started leaking out. First off, there is a different sort o

I'll chime in on this.. Some buddies and I have been debating this since the comodo stuff first started leaking out. First off, there is a different sort of modern attack that's far worse than most others, and it's attacking the trust model. TLS and PKI hasn't been broken, the way it is used and managed has raised some questions though. The thing that can happen here, a lot of people will just jump ship on it all (and quite honestly, there isn't an alternative right now, the alternative is no security) and that's not good. This is happening a couple different ways, first people don't understand it, second people are raising fears over foreign CAs being included in browsers and OSes. It seems like the bigger problem to me is that PKI is a dynamic system and the implementations are all static. When a web site is authenticated, the browser could establish a connection to the CA provide, signed by another CA even, and check to see if it has been revoked, if it has been signed, etc.. It could actually verify the third party authentication, live in real-time. To fake a site you'd need to compromise 2 different CA's in that case. And revocation certificates could be sent and honored, in real-time. It seems to me like it's all rooted in the pay for security model. CAs need to verify each other and the distribution of a new CA needs to be a fairly steep and difficult thing to do (not impossible, but maybe face-to-face contact is required) and any hint of mis-use needs to result in revocation.