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Of all the CAs my browser trusts, any single one of them can compromise the entire web by fucking up and issuing bad certificates. I have no say in which CAs I
by tbrownaw 12y ago
Of all the CAs my browser trusts, any single one of them can compromise the entire web by fucking up and issuing bad certificates.
I have no say in which CAs I "trust", since my list has to match the list that site owners pick from. Site owners have no benefit from picking better CAs on the list over worse CAs also on the list, because my browser trusts them the same.
How could anyone think this is a good system!?
[Edit: and yeah, things like cert pinning can mitigate the damage a bit. That's not enough to make a bad idea suddenly a good idea, and it only took approximately forever to start being implemented.]
- dragonwriter 12y agoIf users had and at least some exercised control over trusted CAs, at least to the extent of disabling if not adding, then site owners should have an incentive to choose better CAs, since worse CAs would be disabled by security-conscious users.
- MichaelGG 12y agoThe idea, as far as there is one, is that if a CA does fuck up for real, then they get revoked and are out of business. But the Comodo "let's trust resellers to validate" didn't have any impact (and I get 2-8 calls s week from em often). Browsers might consider showing the country of the registrar, in the UI. So if I ever connect to a Canadian or US domain, and the registrar is some totally unrelated country, I could be alarmed. OTOH this might just end up confusing people even more.