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by wang_li 155 days ago
My browser on my work laptop has 219 root certificates trusted. Some of those may be installed from my employer, but I suspect most of them come from MS as it's Edge on Windows 11. I see in that list things like "Swedish Government Root Authority" "Thailand National Root Certification Authority" "Staat der Nederlanden Root CA" and things like "MULTICERT Root Certification Authority" "ACCVRAUZ1". I don't think there is any reason to believe any certificate. If a government wants a cert for a given DNS they will get it, either because they directly control a trusted root CA, or because they will present a warrant to a company that wants to do business in their jurisdiction and said company will issue the cert.

TLS certs should be treated much more akin to SSH host keys in the known hosts file. Browsers should record the cert the first time they see it and then warn me if it changes before it's expiration date, or some time near the expiration date.
2 comments
londons_explore 155 days ago
Certificate transparency effectively means that any government actually uses a false certificate on the wider web and their root cert will get revoked.

Obviously you might still be victim #1 of such a scheme... But in general the CA's now aren't really trusted anymore - the real root of trust is the CT logs.

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PunchyHamster 155 days ago
> Certificate transparency effectively means that any government actually uses a false certificate on the wider web and their root cert will get revoked.

the ENTIRE reason the short lifetime is used for the LE certs is that they haven't figured out how to make revoking work at scale.

Now if you're on latest browser you might be fine but any and every embedded device have their root CAs updated only on software update, which means compromise of CA might easily get access to hundreds of thousands devices.

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Dylan16807 154 days ago
> the ENTIRE reason the short lifetime is used for the LE certs is that they haven't figured out how to make revoking work at scale.

And 200 is not "at scale". The list of difficulties in revoking roots is a very different list from the problem you're citing.

> any and every embedded device

Yes it's flawed but it's so much better than the previous nothing we had for detecting one of the too-many CAs going rogue.

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jofla_net 155 days ago
>> TLS certs should be treated much more akin to SSH host keys in the known hosts file. Browsers should record the cert the first time they see it and then warn me if it changes before it's expiration date, or some time near the expiration date.

This is great, and actually constructive!

I use, a hack i put together http://www.jofla.net/php__/CertChecker/ to keep a list (in json) of a bunch of machines (both https and SSH) and the last fingerprints/date it sees. Every time it runs i can see if any server has changed, just is a heads-up for any funny business. Sure its got shortcommings, it doesnt mimmic headers and such but its a start.

It would be great if browsers could all, you know, have some type of distributed protocol, ie DHT where by at least some concensus about whether this cert has been seen by me or enough peers lately.

Having a ton of CAs and the ability to have any link in that chain sing for ANY site is crazy, and until you've seen examples of abuse you assume the foundations are sound.

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