[rschoultz]

I don't think Geoff Huston argued for more CAs or a different distribution. His view is, in my experience, shared by many, regardless of nationality, though not as vocal. There are simply too many examples of compromised CAs, and the webpki system makes anyone vulnerable to the weakest of them.

[snowwrestler]

I find it hard to square the paranoia about CAs with the imposed death penalty on Symantec's certificate business. If no one is watching the CA's, how did Symantec get caught and punished? And for what seemed like relatively minor infractions?

I think its possible that the average web developer underestimates the degree to which the web PKI is monitored by private and government organizations. And public cert logging only makes that easier.

[theamk]

Are compromised CAs worse than other software bugs though?

Yes, we have too many CAs, and some of them are pretty suspicious. It would be great to be able to give them TLD limits. But becoming a CA is still very slow and expensive, and certificate transparency will catch bad behavior. So there is a very strong incentive for each CA to be good.

Compare this to random server exploit, which is deployed anonymously and has no direct monetary harm to the maker company.

No wonder there has been very few cases of CA-based compromise compared to good old software exploits.

[cryptonector]

"More CAs" == worse. I don't know what "different distribution" means.

Anything that doesn't have a strong hierarchical binding to the names users understand (domainnames) is simply not going to have better security than WebPKI.