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by xg15 479 days ago
> Operators of large web sites then can and should monitor the CT logs to make sure that nobody issued a certificate for their domains, and they can and will raise hell if they see that happen.

The tech is definitely an improvement from the previous situation, but I've always wondered about this step: Suppose you've found an unauthorized certificate for your site in the log (and you're not Google, Apple or Microsoft). Then what? What can you actually do about it?

1 comments

Good question!

When you inform the CA about the incident they are required to revoke the certificate. AFAICT they are also expected to file an incident report to Mozilla’s Bugzilla bug tracker (they have a section just for stuff like this).

The operations of Certificate Authorities are strictly regulated by policies such as the “Baseline Requirements” (Baseline Requirements for the Issuance and Management of Publicly‐Trusted TLS Server Certificates), Mozilla’s Root Store Policy and the policies of the Common CA Database. If a CA fails to live up to these requirements, the major browsers will kick their root cert of their root stores. (This is not an empty threat.)

You can find some more info here:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA/Responding_To_An_Incident

https://cabforum.org/working-groups/server/baseline-requirem... (section 4.9)

The bugzilla I mentioned is here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?product=CA%20Progra... – AFAICT, a lot of the deviations are reported by CA staff themselves. So the whole system is actually quite open and self-regulating, not as corrupt and scammy as many seem to believe.