5 ms·

This somehow confirms my gut feeling that digital certificates are mainly a means to enforce exclusion on behalf of the certificate authority ownership. It is a

This somehow confirms my gut feeling that digital certificates are mainly a means to enforce exclusion on behalf of the certificate authority ownership. It is a tool to prevent people from taking full ownership and control of whatever is affected by digital certificates, be it software, firmware, hardware, or as in this case SSL/TLS. That's digital tyranny in disguise.

MarleTangible 4mo ago
I always saw it as a trust-chain and think that anyone is welcomed to create a root certificate and distribute it to whomever trusts them. Most simple services may not need TLS, but with the ISPs eavesdropping on our communication, a form of secure communication is required and the currently best solution we have requires a trust-chain to be built.
- Parodper 4mo ago
  We could, and should, switch to DANE. Or else, switch to how X.509 was supposed to be used, with each country running a CA for their nationals.
  - theamk 4mo ago
    I trust governments much less that a conglomerate of competing corporations. With all the problems with Web PKI, at least the bad actors are getting distrusted, and this provides a very strong enforcement on the rest. And Certificate Transparency makes sure the mis-issuance would be caught. It is not perfect by any means, but things are getting better. With DANE (or other country-issued certificates), every government will absolutely double-issue certificates to police, secret service and friends of goverment, and no one will have any recourse. (In the past I'd say that only countries like Russia would do it.. but with today's climate, I am sure both US and many European countries will do that too)
    - account42 4mo ago
      Pretty much any big government has a CA they can exert direct control over whenever needed.
      - theamk 4mo ago
        Maybe, but then can only do it once. Then they get caught, and their CA is distrusted. See Diginotar [0] for example. And things only gotten better since - we now have CT logs, and browsers require them, so any mis-issuance can be detected automatically, by any interested third party. If we go to DANE, we lose this all. "Oops, our CT uploader process failed, we will fix Real Soon(tm) we promise" - and what are browsers going to do? Distrust the entire country? [0] https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2011/09/02/diginotar-removal-follow-up/ https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2011/09/02/diginotar-remov...
        deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
        JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
        Side note: “DigiNotar BV was a Dutch certificate authority from 1998 to 2011. It was acquired in January 2011 by VASCO and subsequently declared bankrupt in September of the same year” [1]. I didn’t realize the slapped their face on the pavement right after being acquired. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiNotar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiNotar
        Fnoord 4mo ago
        The Dutch government didn't exercise control over Diginotar. In the Dutch hacker scene, Diginotar was a meme. Everyone knew it was a mess there.
    - Parodper 4mo ago
      > every government will absolutely double-issue certificates to police, secret service and friends of goverment, and no one will have any recourse. Countries already have CA that issue certificates with more legal force than a handwritten signature. I can open a bank account, pay my taxes and sign up to all government services. But I can't use them for a webpage. > With DANE (or other country-issued certificates) DANE isn't a country-issued certificate. It's a scheme where you store your public keys on DNS records. Of course, now we have the issue that DNSSEC (signed DNS records) isn't widespread and the whole issue with DNS registries.
- account42 4mo ago
  Do we also need to put all our letters into strongboxes before we send them? Maybe we should have solve the ISP snooping problem by making that illegal instead.
  - theamk 4mo ago
    This just leaves every single public Wifi network - which used to mess with traffic a lot
    - cyanydeez 4mo ago
      Guys, we live in a society.
  - lxgr 4mo ago
    > Do we also need to put all our letters into strongboxes before we send them? If it were as cheap and efficient as TLS these days, yes, absolutely > Maybe we should have solve the ISP snooping problem by making that illegal instead. We could do both! ISP snooping is still a problem for metadata (SNI).
    - account42 4mo ago
      Apparently the cost of TLS these days is to subject yourself to whatever laws that countries of "free" TLS want to impose on you. That isn't very cheap.
      - lxgr 4mo ago
        I'd also love TOFU for TLS, at least on .local TLDs, but for publicly hosted websites, I've come around to the idea that maybe encryption without authentication would not help that much these days. As for who does that authentication: Given all the suggestions in the sibling threads, I really don't think we're in a situation where there's a single entity gatekeeping access by any means.
- thaumasiotes 4mo ago
  > I always saw it as a trust-chain and think that anyone is welcomed to create a root certificate and distribute it to whomever trusts them. Note that phones already try to prevent you from using a certificate that you provide yourself.
  - fluoridation 4mo ago
    "Try to prevent"? What does that mean?
    - trumpdong 4mo ago
      It means they prevent, unless you perform several undocumented arcane rituals.
      - thaumasiotes 4mo ago
        In this case, you have to compile the OS yourself and patch the trusted certificate store.
- happosai 4mo ago
  It is such a great improvement that ISPs cannot eavesdrop us anymore... only for everyone to terminate TLS at cloudflare so they (and thus US government) can now eavesdrop everyone.
  - owl57 4mo ago
    If you have a service that shares information between people all over the world, a few big companies and one government is for most cases an improvement over all the involved ISPs and all of their respective governments.
    - dijit 4mo ago
      That's not the trade-off you make though. The involved ISP and respective governments do still see everything, but also cloudflare and the US ISPs they use see it in the clear. Also the US has a history of abusing its position here, even with less honeypot like companies.
  - rixed 4mo ago
    Ultimately, I find it likely that TLS will become a tool to prevent users from accessing foreign content (browsers stubbornly refusing to show untrusted sites in the name of security, slowly getting there), more than a tool to prevent eavesdropping on users secrets.
- lesostep 4mo ago
  The problem is that finding a root source of trust aren't easy this days. LE was neutral, now nobody is. Russian government issued their new root certificate years ago. Nobody trusted it enough to request a certificate from them or install it on their computers. Including almost all of the russian residents. If Let's Encrypt enforces the rules, as written in pdf, a lot of people would lose a choice. Frankly, even publishing a statement like that would make the scales of trust tip for some.
  - LtWorf 4mo ago
    > Nobody trusted it Let's be real here… 99.99999999999999% of internet users have no idea what root CAs even are. It's the browser vendor mafia that makes the decision.
    - lesostep 4mo ago
      >> 99.99999999999999% of internet users have no idea what root CAs even are that would be like *checks math* less than a human aware of root CA? Can't be right. anyway, people living in russia are statistically more aware. There was a campaign after new root CA was issued. It was on a news, on the official channels, in the mail and on the posters. A lot of government sites begged to install them whenever you visited. It's not like they released it silently.
    - cpud36 4mo ago
      Force the people and then give them simple instructions to install certificate. And it's done. Forcing is as easy, as blocking access to important services behind the certificate wall.
palmotea 4mo ago
> This somehow confirms my gut feeling that digital certificates are mainly a means to enforce exclusion on behalf of the certificate authority ownership. It is a tool to prevent people from taking full ownership and control of whatever is affected by digital certificates, be it software, firmware, hardware, or as in this case SSL/TLS. That's digital tyranny in disguise. I think the "digital tyranny" is a side effect, not the main goal. They're "mainly a means" to prevent certain kinds of MITM attacks.
- account42 4mo ago
  You could that with a much saner approach like DANE.
  - franga2000 4mo ago
    Not back when SSL and the PKI ecosystem was developed.
    - trumpdong 4mo ago
      Yes actually you still could've. But it would require a pass through the IETF to stabdaddize a DNS record type, and that would delay Netscape's release.
      - franga2000 4mo ago
        Any DNS-based solution needs something like DNSSEC to work. I believe DNSSEC didn't exist yet when HTTPS was being developed and even if it did, it wasn't anywhere near ubiquitous enough. Is it even these days?
        account42 4mo ago
        That's kind of like saying that any CA-based solution needs something like a root program. Sure, but that would just be part of creating a DANE-like solution. Both the current CA solution and DANE or another hypothetical DNS-based solution are fundamentally similar on a technical level: hierarchical delegation of authorization backed by public key crypto. The main difference is where on the delegation chain you limit authority for further delegation and who controls the root. The DNS-based approach has the crypto system reflect real ownership while the CA-based approach has browsers makers at the top and whoever pays enough money and hasn't publicly fucked up yet at the middle with delegated authority to sign literally everything.
belorn 4mo ago
While it seems like certificate authority has the primary control here, the real control lies in browsers and operative systems in which certificate authorities are trusted. Users also have, at least for the moment, control to add or remove certificate authorities, even if that control is slightly less clear for devices like smart phones. Digital certificates that signs software packages are used to enforce exclusion by some manufacturers. Let's encrypt is not in that space to my knowledge, but it is a place where you the owner do not have the right to determine which certificate authority should be trusted, and generally the only one that is trusted is the manufacturer. Its arguable if we even should be calling such entities a certificate authority, even if they technically are the owner of the root certificate that signs the package.
- hulitu 4mo ago
  > the real control lies in browsers and operative systems in which certificate authorities are trusted Wasn't Let's encrypt a Mozilla child ? The real control lies at who defines what is trusted.
  - ulfbert_inc 4mo ago
    Local control, maybe. But not the power.
kube-system 4mo ago
The entire point of a trust model is to exclude people. That's the stated goal. If you want encryption without trust, just use self-signed certs.
- 13415 4mo ago
  The problem is that the current trust model is totally untrustworthy.
  - kube-system 4mo ago
    Philosophically, trust isn't a "solvable" problem. It can only be mitigated to varying degrees. However, some degree of trust is probably better than none.
    - 13415 4mo ago
      One thing is sure, pinning trust on trust chains down from Root Certificate Authorities is fundamentally incompatible with our notion of trust and an almost absurd idea to start with. Most people using a browser don't even know any person from such an organization nor would or should they have any rational reason to trust them.
      - kube-system 4mo ago
        > our notion of trust I suspect I may have a different notion of trust than you > Most people using a browser don't even know any person from such an organization nor would or should they have any rational reason to trust them. Back up one step further -- most people using a browser don't understand the problem set we're talking about even exists
        13415 4mo ago
        As long as you're human, you don't have a substantially different notion of trust than I do. It's part of human psychology. We had to evolve it as social beings. I've seen very ad hoc CS papers on "trust", though, which IMHO were based on nothing but fantasy. Perhaps you had one of those re-definitions in mind. I tried to contribute to this pointless literature myself for a while until I realized that it's completely fictitious. All you can say from a mathematical perspective is that trust builds up very slowly based on a numerous factors and, if betrayed, goes down very fast and stays there. However, the notion doesn't have enough substance for a fruitful non-psychological modeling; there is just not enough ideal rationality behind it.

MarleTangible 4mo ago

I always saw it as a trust-chain and think that anyone is welcomed to create a root certificate and distribute it to whomever trusts them. Most simple services may not need TLS, but with the ISPs eavesdropping on our communication, a form of secure communication is required and the currently best solution we have requires a trust-chain to be built.

Parodper 4mo ago
We could, and should, switch to DANE. Or else, switch to how X.509 was supposed to be used, with each country running a CA for their nationals.
- theamk 4mo ago
  I trust governments much less that a conglomerate of competing corporations. With all the problems with Web PKI, at least the bad actors are getting distrusted, and this provides a very strong enforcement on the rest. And Certificate Transparency makes sure the mis-issuance would be caught. It is not perfect by any means, but things are getting better. With DANE (or other country-issued certificates), every government will absolutely double-issue certificates to police, secret service and friends of goverment, and no one will have any recourse. (In the past I'd say that only countries like Russia would do it.. but with today's climate, I am sure both US and many European countries will do that too)
  - account42 4mo ago
    Pretty much any big government has a CA they can exert direct control over whenever needed.
    - theamk 4mo ago
      Maybe, but then can only do it once. Then they get caught, and their CA is distrusted. See Diginotar [0] for example. And things only gotten better since - we now have CT logs, and browsers require them, so any mis-issuance can be detected automatically, by any interested third party. If we go to DANE, we lose this all. "Oops, our CT uploader process failed, we will fix Real Soon(tm) we promise" - and what are browsers going to do? Distrust the entire country? [0] https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2011/09/02/diginotar-removal-follow-up/ https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2011/09/02/diginotar-remov...
      - deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
      - JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
        Side note: “DigiNotar BV was a Dutch certificate authority from 1998 to 2011. It was acquired in January 2011 by VASCO and subsequently declared bankrupt in September of the same year” [1]. I didn’t realize the slapped their face on the pavement right after being acquired. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiNotar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiNotar
      - Fnoord 4mo ago
        The Dutch government didn't exercise control over Diginotar. In the Dutch hacker scene, Diginotar was a meme. Everyone knew it was a mess there.
  - Parodper 4mo ago
    > every government will absolutely double-issue certificates to police, secret service and friends of goverment, and no one will have any recourse. Countries already have CA that issue certificates with more legal force than a handwritten signature. I can open a bank account, pay my taxes and sign up to all government services. But I can't use them for a webpage. > With DANE (or other country-issued certificates) DANE isn't a country-issued certificate. It's a scheme where you store your public keys on DNS records. Of course, now we have the issue that DNSSEC (signed DNS records) isn't widespread and the whole issue with DNS registries.
account42 4mo ago
Do we also need to put all our letters into strongboxes before we send them? Maybe we should have solve the ISP snooping problem by making that illegal instead.
- theamk 4mo ago
  This just leaves every single public Wifi network - which used to mess with traffic a lot
  - cyanydeez 4mo ago
    Guys, we live in a society.
- lxgr 4mo ago
  > Do we also need to put all our letters into strongboxes before we send them? If it were as cheap and efficient as TLS these days, yes, absolutely > Maybe we should have solve the ISP snooping problem by making that illegal instead. We could do both! ISP snooping is still a problem for metadata (SNI).
  - account42 4mo ago
    Apparently the cost of TLS these days is to subject yourself to whatever laws that countries of "free" TLS want to impose on you. That isn't very cheap.
    - lxgr 4mo ago
      I'd also love TOFU for TLS, at least on .local TLDs, but for publicly hosted websites, I've come around to the idea that maybe encryption without authentication would not help that much these days. As for who does that authentication: Given all the suggestions in the sibling threads, I really don't think we're in a situation where there's a single entity gatekeeping access by any means.
thaumasiotes 4mo ago
> I always saw it as a trust-chain and think that anyone is welcomed to create a root certificate and distribute it to whomever trusts them. Note that phones already try to prevent you from using a certificate that you provide yourself.
- fluoridation 4mo ago
  "Try to prevent"? What does that mean?
  - trumpdong 4mo ago
    It means they prevent, unless you perform several undocumented arcane rituals.
    - thaumasiotes 4mo ago
      In this case, you have to compile the OS yourself and patch the trusted certificate store.
happosai 4mo ago
It is such a great improvement that ISPs cannot eavesdrop us anymore... only for everyone to terminate TLS at cloudflare so they (and thus US government) can now eavesdrop everyone.
- owl57 4mo ago
  If you have a service that shares information between people all over the world, a few big companies and one government is for most cases an improvement over all the involved ISPs and all of their respective governments.
  - dijit 4mo ago
    That's not the trade-off you make though. The involved ISP and respective governments do still see everything, but also cloudflare and the US ISPs they use see it in the clear. Also the US has a history of abusing its position here, even with less honeypot like companies.
- rixed 4mo ago
  Ultimately, I find it likely that TLS will become a tool to prevent users from accessing foreign content (browsers stubbornly refusing to show untrusted sites in the name of security, slowly getting there), more than a tool to prevent eavesdropping on users secrets.
lesostep 4mo ago
The problem is that finding a root source of trust aren't easy this days. LE was neutral, now nobody is. Russian government issued their new root certificate years ago. Nobody trusted it enough to request a certificate from them or install it on their computers. Including almost all of the russian residents. If Let's Encrypt enforces the rules, as written in pdf, a lot of people would lose a choice. Frankly, even publishing a statement like that would make the scales of trust tip for some.
- LtWorf 4mo ago
  > Nobody trusted it Let's be real here… 99.99999999999999% of internet users have no idea what root CAs even are. It's the browser vendor mafia that makes the decision.
  - lesostep 4mo ago
    >> 99.99999999999999% of internet users have no idea what root CAs even are that would be like *checks math* less than a human aware of root CA? Can't be right. anyway, people living in russia are statistically more aware. There was a campaign after new root CA was issued. It was on a news, on the official channels, in the mail and on the posters. A lot of government sites begged to install them whenever you visited. It's not like they released it silently.
  - cpud36 4mo ago
    Force the people and then give them simple instructions to install certificate. And it's done. Forcing is as easy, as blocking access to important services behind the certificate wall.

palmotea 4mo ago

> This somehow confirms my gut feeling that digital certificates are mainly a means to enforce exclusion on behalf of the certificate authority ownership. It is a tool to prevent people from taking full ownership and control of whatever is affected by digital certificates, be it software, firmware, hardware, or as in this case SSL/TLS. That's digital tyranny in disguise. I think the "digital tyranny" is a side effect, not the main goal. They're "mainly a means" to prevent certain kinds of MITM attacks.

account42 4mo ago
You could that with a much saner approach like DANE.
- franga2000 4mo ago
  Not back when SSL and the PKI ecosystem was developed.
  - trumpdong 4mo ago
    Yes actually you still could've. But it would require a pass through the IETF to stabdaddize a DNS record type, and that would delay Netscape's release.
    - franga2000 4mo ago
      Any DNS-based solution needs something like DNSSEC to work. I believe DNSSEC didn't exist yet when HTTPS was being developed and even if it did, it wasn't anywhere near ubiquitous enough. Is it even these days?
      - account42 4mo ago
        That's kind of like saying that any CA-based solution needs something like a root program. Sure, but that would just be part of creating a DANE-like solution. Both the current CA solution and DANE or another hypothetical DNS-based solution are fundamentally similar on a technical level: hierarchical delegation of authorization backed by public key crypto. The main difference is where on the delegation chain you limit authority for further delegation and who controls the root. The DNS-based approach has the crypto system reflect real ownership while the CA-based approach has browsers makers at the top and whoever pays enough money and hasn't publicly fucked up yet at the middle with delegated authority to sign literally everything.

belorn 4mo ago

While it seems like certificate authority has the primary control here, the real control lies in browsers and operative systems in which certificate authorities are trusted. Users also have, at least for the moment, control to add or remove certificate authorities, even if that control is slightly less clear for devices like smart phones. Digital certificates that signs software packages are used to enforce exclusion by some manufacturers. Let's encrypt is not in that space to my knowledge, but it is a place where you the owner do not have the right to determine which certificate authority should be trusted, and generally the only one that is trusted is the manufacturer. Its arguable if we even should be calling such entities a certificate authority, even if they technically are the owner of the root certificate that signs the package.

hulitu 4mo ago
> the real control lies in browsers and operative systems in which certificate authorities are trusted Wasn't Let's encrypt a Mozilla child ? The real control lies at who defines what is trusted.
- ulfbert_inc 4mo ago
  Local control, maybe. But not the power.

kube-system 4mo ago

The entire point of a trust model is to exclude people. That's the stated goal. If you want encryption without trust, just use self-signed certs.

13415 4mo ago
The problem is that the current trust model is totally untrustworthy.
- kube-system 4mo ago
  Philosophically, trust isn't a "solvable" problem. It can only be mitigated to varying degrees. However, some degree of trust is probably better than none.
  - 13415 4mo ago
    One thing is sure, pinning trust on trust chains down from Root Certificate Authorities is fundamentally incompatible with our notion of trust and an almost absurd idea to start with. Most people using a browser don't even know any person from such an organization nor would or should they have any rational reason to trust them.
    - kube-system 4mo ago
      > our notion of trust I suspect I may have a different notion of trust than you > Most people using a browser don't even know any person from such an organization nor would or should they have any rational reason to trust them. Back up one step further -- most people using a browser don't understand the problem set we're talking about even exists
      - 13415 4mo ago
        As long as you're human, you don't have a substantially different notion of trust than I do. It's part of human psychology. We had to evolve it as social beings. I've seen very ad hoc CS papers on "trust", though, which IMHO were based on nothing but fantasy. Perhaps you had one of those re-definitions in mind. I tried to contribute to this pointless literature myself for a while until I realized that it's completely fictitious. All you can say from a mathematical perspective is that trust builds up very slowly based on a numerous factors and, if betrayed, goes down very fast and stays there. However, the notion doesn't have enough substance for a fruitful non-psychological modeling; there is just not enough ideal rationality behind it.