Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 2757 days ago
Well, yeah, using a made up domain is obviously a bad idea ... but what does that have to do with root CAs? And how does trusting your own root CA lead to not trusting the certs presented by other parties? I don't really understand what kind of scenario you are describing there.

And no, I don't see anything "standard" about not running your own CA, it is perfectly standard as far as I am concerned, and a really good idea as well. Relying on an external CA for internal services just creates risks of both availability and security. If you need an external CA to set up or continue operating internal services, that is an availability risk, and if you trust the whole standard set of root CAs for all of your internal services, that's a massive security risk.
1 comments
rblatz 2757 days ago
Obviously if all your services are hosted in house and you will never need to expose internal services externally go for it. But as soon as your organization grows, splits, merges or starts utilizing other services that don’t give you access to the trust store you are boned. It screwed us, and was a giant pain to fix.
link
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 2757 days ago
Why would all your services have to be hosted in house and why would it prevent you from "exposing internal services" (I mean, apart from the fact that they kindof aren't internal services anymore from that point on)?

For one, there is no problem hosting your own services elsewhere and having them use your own certificates. But more importantly: Why should your own CA prevent you from obtaining certificates from an external CA for external services? I mean, it just doesn't, that's how I run stuff: Purely internal stuff runs on internal CA, stuff that needs to face the public somehow runs on globally recognized CAs. And it's mostly trivial to switch services from one to the other - or to just run two endpoints, one using the internal CA, one using an external CA.

It seems to me like your problem wasn't your own root CA, your problem was that your services were incompatible with external CAs for some reason, among them probably your private DNS root? But that isn't a reason why you should put your internal services at risk from mismanaged public CAs, that's simply a reason why you should use a global domain and support provisioning of certificates from external CAs.

link
rblatz 2754 days ago
The big issue was identifying all the impacted services, reconfiguring all of them testing and redeploying them. If it’s a few services fine. But once it’s a few hundred it’s a pain.
link
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 2754 days ago
Well ... but then that still has nothing to do with using your own root CA, does it? I mean, why would you want to suddenly reconfigure all of your services to use a different CA? It might come up here and there that you need external access to some service hat was internal before, but that is hardly a huge problem to reconfigure?!

And also, if you have so many services running that swapping out all of the certificates is a major headache, your primary mistake probably was that that wasn't automated? When keys are compromised, you should be able to reprovision anyway.

link