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There is a splinter group of people- who- want- DNSSEC who argue that DNSSEC will obviate the need for CAs. There reasoning, distilled, is that DNSSEC is itself a PKI, with the roots signing TLDs and TLDS signing domains and so on. Since the core architecture purpose of certificates is to "break the tie" between an attacker's public key and the real site's public key, and since DNSSEC zones could serve the same purpose, by housing a DNSSEC-signed public key, blammo, no more Verisign.

There are a bunch of problems with this idea. Most of the ones that spring to my mind are problems with DNSSEC in general: its brittleness, the reliability problems I think it's going to cause, the things it does that actually diminish the security of the DNS... but the big point relevant here is: DNSSEC replaces a market of CAs with a baked- into- the- Internet fiat authority. If DNSSEC had replaced SSL CA's in the mid '00s, Ghaddafi's Libya would have been Bit.ly's CA. This does not seem like a win to me.

I don't think that rent-seeking SSL CAs are as big a problem as many HN users seem to think they are. I think ultimately there's significant expense involved in operating a secure CA, and that relative to their purported value, CA certificates are reasonably priced.

The pressing problem with SSL/TLS is that CAs aren't trustworthy. They are rent-seeking, as expected, but also shoddily operated. The Internet has largely lost faith in the people operating CAs.

Moreover, a decade and a half of browser/CA relationships have left all the major browsers riddled with skeleton-key CA certs run by organization that nobody can really vouch for. As a result, large companies have purchased browser-trusted CA operations, and then used them to do incredibly dubious things. The companies that have been caught doing skanky stuff with their CA keys haven't even been kicked out of the browser CA stores.

As a result, we're left with a situation in which untrustworthy companies can potentially sign certificates for (and thus enable transparent MITM attacks against) critically important sites, like Google Mail. That's an untenable position.

I personally believe (and, yes, hope) that the future of Internet security looks much like today, except with things like Trevor Perrin and Moxie Marlinspike's TACK scheme, to allow security-sensitive sites to overrule bogus CAs, and to allow us to gradually decrease the architectural dependence we have on SSL CAs and start experimenting with more flexible alternatives.

I am not a fan of trying to take the same model that just failed us, but centralizing it and handing it over to the unaccountable groups of people who control the domain name system.