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You're thinking too small scale. Certificate Authorities are almost certainly compromised. Why bother with one at a time when you can just force the vendor to
by jaggederest 13y ago
You're thinking too small scale.
Certificate Authorities are almost certainly compromised. Why bother with one at a time when you can just force the vendor to hand the keys to the castle over? Sign your own certs, MITM anyone you want.
- nwh 13y agoMITM isn't the issue, we assume for the most part that the NSA is a passive eavesdropper. Easier in that situation to sniff and decode with a stolen secret, rather than rewriting traffic on the fly.
- jaggederest 13y agoRight, but my point is that the CA is the central point of failure for all of those scenarios.
- nwh 13y agoNot really. For a passive attack the key would have to be stolen from a server rather then the CA, who never sees the private key, rather only the CSR (public key).
- jaggederest 13y agoWe're assuming under the current circumstances that it's backdoored, basically. The NSA definitely doesn't want to have to go knock on doors to collect those private keys.
- alextingle 13y agoThe CA doesn't usually have access to your private key - they just sign the public key.
- jaggederest 13y agoRight, I've gotten certs before. I'm saying that they could be faking certs for their own usage, and we're also assuming they have subtle backdoors in openssl, for example, to perhaps render having the private key moot.