[stephenmac98]

I didn't say a "pinned self signed cert is insecure"

I said that self-signed certs are a lazy choice

I also said "allowing the end-user to confirm a certificate offers basically 0 protection" If an average user get's prompted to trust a certificate they will do so blindly At most, someone might look at the subject, but it's 0 effort for a malicious actor to generate a self-signed cert with the same subject, which will be sufficient to fool a decent chunk of users

Pinned certificates do relieve the above issue, but it is still a lazy choice that creates increased long term complexity in the configuration of multi-system environments Presumably most services that you run, run over TLS, do you really maintain every certificate both on it's application and on everything which needs to connect to it? That's a huge amount more effort than signing all your PKI with an internal CA, the configuring your connecting applications to trust that CA Using a CA also allows for use of CRLs or OCPS. If you have 20 devices configured to trust a given self-signed certificate, and that certificate leaks, you now have to update all 20 devices to remove that trust. If you used a CA and implemented either a CRL or OCSP, then you only have to update the respective impelmentation and all of yoru clients will immediately stop trusting that certificate.

In Summary: Using an internal CA offers all the potential protections of pinned certificate, with a number of additional useful security options like OCSP or CRLs Using Self signed certificates creates more work when handling certificate leaks or certificate rotation Using a CA is the industry standard practice, I highly doubt there is a single outward facing project by a major company using a directly self-signed certificate. BUT A self signed certificate is lower effort on the initial setup

Lazy

[kortilla]

You need to calm down and take a step back to realize not everyone needs to support 20 devices or even 2. What you’ve suggested is a ridiculous blanket statement assuming everyone is setting up things for a fleet of clients.

[mmd45]

for the use case of a single user IMAP server this is all way, way, too complicated and buys you nothing in terms of security. it's completely analogous to why we dont use CAs to validate openssh host certificates.

[Twisell]

Yes it's a analogous using CA is still a higher bar, but it would arguably be better to also use CA to validate openssh host certificates for all the reasons he listed above.

So maybe we should ask ourselves why can't we just figure out a way to improve handling of CA? Thanks to Let's Encrypt https coverage dramatically improved, now is maybe the time for more people to switch to self CA.

I agree though that promoting adoption through good tooling and pedagogy would be a nicer approach than Apple slap on the wrist.