[cpach]

“Are they a single point of failure in that regard?”

It depends. If the ACME client is configured to only use Let’s Encrypt, then the answer is yes. But the client could fall-back to Google’s CA, ZeroSSL, etc. And then there is no single point of failure.

[bflesch]

Makes sense. I assume each of them is in control and at the whims of US president?

[cpach]

It seems that currently most free CAs have a big presence in the US, and employ quite a few US employees.

ZeroSSL/HID Global seems to be quite multi-national though, and it’s owned by a Swedish company (Assa Abloy).

I don’t know what what kind of mitigations these orgs have in place if the shit really hits the fan in the US. It’s an interesting question for sure.

[iso1631]

Fundamentally, Microsoft, Google and Apple are all run by American citizens living in America. Firefox is pretty much the same.

The US has strong institutions which prevent the President or Government at large controlling these on a whim. If those institutions fail then they could all push out an update which removes all "top of chain" trusted certificate authorities other than ones approved by the US government.

In that situation the internet is basically finished as it stands now, and the OSes would be non-trustworthy anyway.

Fixing the SSL problems is the easy part, the free world would push its own root certificate out -- which people would have to manually install from a trusted source, but that's nothing compared to the real problem.

Sure, Ubuntu, Suse etc aren't based in the US, but the number of phones without a US based OS is basically zero, you'd have to start from scratch with a forked version of android which likely has NSA approved backdoors in it anyway. Non-linux based machines would also need to be wiped.

[alwillis]

> Makes sense. I assume each of them is in control and at the whims of US president?

Absolutely not.

If the president attempted to force a US-based CA to do something bad they don't want to do, they would sue the government. So far, this administration loses 80% of the lawsuits brought against it.

[iso1631]

You're putting a lot of trust in US institutions (courts etc). The rest of the world is starting to see them as not a strong and independent as they were once assumed.

And that's before more overt issues. Microsoft/Google/etc could sue to stop the US ordering them to do what they should. Is the CEO really willing to risk their life to do that? Be a terrible shame if their kids got caught up in a traffic accident.

[alwillis]

> You're putting a lot of trust in US institutions (courts etc)

I don't have a lot of trust in US institutions actually. The most powerful universities, corporations and law firms have capitulated to him.

So far, the tech companies have placated Trump by contributing to his causes and heaping praise upon him and not speaking out regarding the tariffs. That's enough for now.

> Is the CEO really willing to risk their life to do that?

We're not at that point; at least not so far. Besides, it's much easier to blackmail them for more money or for the Department of Justice to open an investigation or to stop a merger they want to do.

Also these companies aren't just sitting around doing nothing. Apple reworked their supply chain; all iPhones sold in the US are now made in India.

[mholt]

They are not in control of the US president.

[bflesch]

I'm pretty sure that the .org TLD can be shut off by the US at any point in time.

[iso1631]

Lets Encrypt do not control the US president.

You could argue that The Don in charge of the US is in control of letsencrypt

[bflesch]

Yeah, it's a bit far fetched but after Cloudflare CEO basically threatening to cut off Italy I was wondering what would happen if US really invades Greenland.

A simple windows to linux migration is not enough. If certificates expire without a way to refresh you'd either need to manually touch every machine to swap root certificates or have some of other contingency plan.

[cpach]

Remember that there are lots of CAs, and quite many of them are based outside of the US. Those CAs currently do not offer ACME services for free, but there’s nothing stopping them from doing so.

I would say that the WebPKI system seems to be quite resilient, even in the face of strong geopolitical tension.

[iso1631]

Windows (and apple, google, mozilla) trust dozens of root certificates. I've got 148 pems in my /etc/ssl/certs directory on my laptop. 59 are from the US and thus 89 aren't. 10 are from China, 9 Germany, 7 UK. Others are India, Japan, Korea etc.

The far bigger problem is the American government forcing Microsoft/Apple/Google to push out a windows/iphone|mac/android|chrome update which removes all CAs not approved by the American government.

Canonical/Suse may be immune to such overt pressure, but once you get to that point you're way past the end of the international internet and it doesn't really matter anyway.

[alwillis]

> You could argue that The Don in charge of the US is in control of letsencrypt

He's not in control of letsencrypt or any other US-based CA.

It may not be well known, but Trump's administration loses about 80% of the time when they've been sued by companies, cities and states.

There's much more risk of state-sponsored cyber attacks against US companies.

[cpach]

That’s not relevant though. These CAs will gladly give you a .se/.dk/.in/whatever cert as long as validation passes.

[bflesch]

I hope so, but can we really be sure that .se or .de would still work in such a scenario? Is the TLD root management really split up vertically or is the (presumably US-based) TLD parent organization also the final authority for every country TLD?

It would be nice to at least have a very high level contingency plan because in worst case I won't be able to google it.

[cpach]

Not sure what the exact concern is here. So far, virtually all countries on Earth are still represented in DNS. Venezuela, Iran, Somalia, etc etc.

You can also read a lot of anti-Trump articles and comments on countless web-sites, some under .com and some under other top-domains. As lunatic as Trump is, he hasn’t shut that down.

“Is the TLD root management really split up vertically”

AFAIK, yes, it is.

But if the global DNS would somehow break down I guess you either have to find an alternative set of root servers. Or communicate outside of the regular Internet. Such an event surely would shock the global economy.