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I get why it is important, but certs can be a tremendous pain to deal with when you're in a niche industry and reliant on the only vendor in town, and the conse

I get why it is important, but certs can be a tremendous pain to deal with when you're in a niche industry and reliant on the only vendor in town, and the consequences of a broken cert were minimal.

0xbadcafebee 3y ago
The whole cert regime is wrongheaded. Issuing certs is vulnerable to exploits, the methods are clunky and problematic, certs expire so quickly that stuff is breaking more often than security issues could ever come up, there's no consideration to private networks, we still don't have content integrity without encryption, content proxy caching is dead, CAs can do what they want (there's too many CAs, cert logs aren't required to be validated in real time, you can't force a CA not to do something shady under a government gag order, etc), and there's a fundamental conflict between the owner of a domain and the issuer of a cert and the owner of a cert and the owner of some IP space or DNS server records. But because it's this giant behemoth involving multiple industries, technological components, and vested interests, it will never change, save to implement bandaid after bandaid after hack after kludge. Literally the only thing that changes it is when someone with enough power (a market-dominant browser) forces it and everyone has to comply, or face creating a total shit-show due to lack of conformance. And we're all hopelessly dependent on it so it's not like we can do anything about it. The security of the web is a Kafkaesque nightmare.
- XorNot 3y ago
  Here's the thing though: the alternatives are also god-awful, and in part it is because the people who make them wind up being very stupid about their choices - i.e. if you want a distributed trust environment fine, but your first, primary and most important use-cases are still going to be government, and corporate, and specifically financial. If your "libre" plan does not involve a way to bring those entities onboard and direct priority to servicing their needs, then no one is going to use it because we all actually live in the real world where those are the things we need security in communicating with.
  - 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
    Agreed 100%. I would prefer a "kinda federated" model where the owner of a domain registers a private key with a Domain Registrar, and CAs send CSRs to Domain Registrars to validate, and when the CA issues a cert, the browser can validate the registrar signed it (and who the domain's registrar is). That avoids all 9 unique attacks on CA validation, and more importantly, actually cryptographically verifies if the CA should issue a cert, which does not happen at all today.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

I get why it is important, but certs can be a tremendous pain to deal with when you're in a niche industry and reliant on the only vendor in town, and the consequences of a broken cert were minimal.

0xbadcafebee 3y ago

The whole cert regime is wrongheaded. Issuing certs is vulnerable to exploits, the methods are clunky and problematic, certs expire so quickly that stuff is breaking more often than security issues could ever come up, there's no consideration to private networks, we still don't have content integrity without encryption, content proxy caching is dead, CAs can do what they want (there's too many CAs, cert logs aren't required to be validated in real time, you can't force a CA not to do something shady under a government gag order, etc), and there's a fundamental conflict between the owner of a domain and the issuer of a cert and the owner of a cert and the owner of some IP space or DNS server records. But because it's this giant behemoth involving multiple industries, technological components, and vested interests, it will never change, save to implement bandaid after bandaid after hack after kludge. Literally the only thing that changes it is when someone with enough power (a market-dominant browser) forces it and everyone has to comply, or face creating a total shit-show due to lack of conformance. And we're all hopelessly dependent on it so it's not like we can do anything about it. The security of the web is a Kafkaesque nightmare.

XorNot 3y ago
Here's the thing though: the alternatives are also god-awful, and in part it is because the people who make them wind up being very stupid about their choices - i.e. if you want a distributed trust environment fine, but your first, primary and most important use-cases are still going to be government, and corporate, and specifically financial. If your "libre" plan does not involve a way to bring those entities onboard and direct priority to servicing their needs, then no one is going to use it because we all actually live in the real world where those are the things we need security in communicating with.
- 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
  Agreed 100%. I would prefer a "kinda federated" model where the owner of a domain registers a private key with a Domain Registrar, and CAs send CSRs to Domain Registrars to validate, and when the CA issues a cert, the browser can validate the registrar signed it (and who the domain's registrar is). That avoids all 9 unique attacks on CA validation, and more importantly, actually cryptographically verifies if the CA should issue a cert, which does not happen at all today.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]