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It's best not to assume a physical presence is required. Who is to say that the people at Let's Encrypt, NoScript, any of the firmwares' authors, or many other
by IncRnd 5y ago
It's best not to assume a physical presence is required. Who is to say that the people at Let's Encrypt, NoScript, any of the firmwares' authors, or many other places weren't compromised years ago? It's sometimes worthwhile to reflect on where trust is placed.
- atonse 5y agoI don’t know. Seeing how extensively these key signing ceremonies (Let’s Encrypt included) are designed against tampering and collusion, I’d be shocked and impressed if they were infiltrated. We’ve found instead that the NSA can just take over your unpatched computer easily instead of putting in the effort of hacking Let’s Encrypt.
- IncRnd 5y agoUnfortunately, a child can take over an unpatched computer using public exploits. Please explain your comment about how key signing ceremonies stop people from being bribed. The creation of those keys creates a root of trust but doesn't stop leaf certs from being generated.
- atonse 5y agoSure it doesn’t stop certs for certain domains but again it feels handwavy to say someone can just as easily do these things. Theoretically yeah. But to be a publicly trusted CA, the kind of processes you need to have a pretty extensive. Still, there are hundreds of publicly trusted CAs so the chance for exploitation is higher.
- nextlevelwizard 5y agoIt would be hell of a trick to inflitrate air gapped machine without physical presence.
- IncRnd 5y agoWe were talking about the NSA getting an exploit onto an individual's computer, not an air gapped machine.