[lucideer]

Knowing quite little about the technicalities behind CT, I'm interested in the scalability of this. If CT were to be piggybacked upon by a large number of open source binary software distributions, I assume this wouldn't be problematic in any way. CT is already designed - I guess - to handle theoretically all domains. Plus, Firefox is a pretty big, popular distribution to be starting with.

[aeijdenberg]

CT logs are designed to be able to handle queries from all web browsers on a daily / more frequent basis, and the output from queries is easily cacheable (and the logs can be mirrored in a read-only manner).

If FF is already doing any log inclusion proofs for certificates, then I think including one more (for the FF release itself) would be pretty much line noise.

I think an interesting question arises as to how well with the CT logs themselves would scale to handle the same kinds of certificates for all binaries, if this ends up taking off as a good idea in general. They've had to handle quite an explosion in X509 certificates over the past year or two due to Let's Encrypt. Some of Google's logs now show more than 80,000,000 certificates [0] in there - IIRC 2 years ago it was a low single digit million.

[0] https://crt.sh/monitored-logs

[tbl]

I actually think that building an independent system for binaries is a better plan, for various reasons.

One is that log bloat is indeed a problem, not so much for the logs, but for those that want to monitor them.

The other is CT has made some tradeoffs to allow cert issuance to be quick. I don't believe binaries need the same tradeoffs, and, for example, instead of an SCT, they should come with an inclusion proof (something I'd like to see for certs, too, in the long run).