[phillipseamore]

My biggest problem is how centralized issuance is.

Half the year I live on an island that is reliant on submarine cables and has historically had weeks and months long outages and with a changing world I suspect that might become reality once again. Locally this wasn't much of an issue, the ccTLD continues to function, most services (but now about 35%) are locally hosted. Then HTTPS comes along. Zero certificates could be (re-)issued during an outage. A locally run CA isn't really an option (standalone simply isn't feasible and getting into root stores takes time and money), so you are left with teaching users to ignore certificate errors a few weeks into an extended outage.

I could see someone like LE working with TLD registrars to enable local issuance (with delegated/sub-CA certificates restricted to the TLD), that could also mitigate problems like today (decentralize issuance) and the registrars are already the primary source of truth for DV validation.

[ocdtrekkie]

Realistically there's no reason except Google retaining centralized control of the Internet for there to be a specific group of trusted CAs that meet Google's arcane specifications which can issue certificates the entire world trusts.

Your registrar should be able to validate your ownership of the domain, ergo your registrar should be your CA. Instead of a bunch of arbitrary and capricious rules to be trusted, a CA should not be "trusted" by the browser, but only able to sign certificates for domains registered to it.

[tptacek]

If your concern is breaking Google's stranglehold on the web, why would Google ever implement DANE? (They probably won't, for other reasons they've already stated, but I'm trying to understand your logic).

[ocdtrekkie]

They wouldn't and that is part of the problem. We are stuck with a fragile and insecure certificate strategy because the existing strategy allows Google significant control of the ecosystem.

The "I support shorter lifetimes so this all comes crashing down" comment I made earlier is arguably a bit facetious, but I do think the PKI wonks in the CAB are pretty much accountable to noone until they break things badly enough that their bosses have to pay attention to the problem.

Antitrust enforcement remains the fix here.

[tptacek]

What other mainstream browser are you counting on to ever support DANE?

[ocdtrekkie]

I feel like this comment ignores the fact that right now all of them are effectively tied to Google, and that supporting DANE if Google doesn't is currently pointless, so obviously no one would until the status quo changes.

Ultimately the problem is that currently "security best practice" as it's commonly discussed, says what we're doing now is a good idea. It's not, and until we change the understanding on that, nobody's going to feel motivated to do better.

Password rotation used to be considered a gold standard strategy for security, until people realized not only did it make everything harder, it also encouraged people to choose less secure passwords and was largely self-defeating.

If I told you we could improve a 90-day password rotation policy by making it change every week, you'd rightly call me crazy, but for some inconceivable reason (monopoly, perverse incentives, appeal to an authority run by idiots, name your choice), people act like decreasing certificate lifetime is somehow going to make the web safer.

[tptacek]

Decreasing certificate lifetime addresses a totally different problem than password rotation.

[phillipseamore]

s/Google/Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla/

[ocdtrekkie]

Not in any realistic way, no. Because Chrome is by far the majority of the market, so what Google ships is what is available on the web. If Google unilaterally decides it is going to distrust a CA, it doesn't really matter who else does or not, the CA is dead.

Not that the other parties are that independent anyways: Microsoft's browser is a Google fork, and is wholly dependent on it. Mozilla's entire funding is Google. Apple is arguably the only somewhat independent party here, but that multibillion dollar annual search deal... let's say it incentivizes collaboration.

[mixdup]

Edge may be a fork of Chromium but they have the capability of shipping whatever roots they want or setting whatever trust policies they want

And the push-down in certificate age is, or at least was at the beginning, a push from Apple. The others have come around/along for the ride