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by tialaramex 2198 days ago
Admin-Root-CA shows us how far we've come, I think today that even if Mozilla's root programme didn't forbid them people would guess that ultra-vague names aren't a good idea.

For reference that is the Swiss government's root and it isn't trusted by Mozilla so as a consequence it's unlikely that any systems you have facing ordinary web browsers depend on this root to be trusted.

It's also funny to go back and look at Mozilla's trust decision (it's before I was engaged in looking at this on a day-to-day basis) and see that the terrible naming was decisive while the practice of just basically trusting a Swiss government employee to issue whatever they want was considered only "problematic" and not necessarily a showstopper.

Of course because Mozilla doesn't trust this root, it does not see itself as having any oversight role for the root. So if you use MacOS, or Windows, to do anything other than run Firefox, you're reliant on their teams to verify that this root is well run. Maybe they're doing a great job? I guess you'd only ever find out the hard way because they operate entirely behind closed doors.

1 comments

Certificate Transparency logs would provide the answer to this.