[Galanwe]

Because there is a quadrillion trusted CAs in every device you might use. A good chunk of these CAs have been compromised at one point or another, and rogue certificates are sold in the dark market. Also any goverment can coerce a domiciled CA to issue certs for their needs.

[hvb2]

That is a wild claim. I can't imagine that being correct given how that's been abused in the past

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/08/iranian-man-middle-att...

[ceejayoz]

It's a pretty huge list.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/126047

The chances of zero of these CAs having been compromised by state-level actors seems… slim.

Do you trust "Hongkong Post Root CA 3" not to fuck with things?

Your link's from 2011; the US government was still in the trusted list until 2018. https://www.idmanagement.gov/implement/announcements/04_appl...

[nucleardog]

All modern browsers require certificates to be published in the certificate transparency logs in order to be considered valid.

These are monitored, things do get noticed[0], and things like this can and have lead to CAs being distrusted.

It's not foolproof, and it's reactive rather than proactive... but in general, this is unlikely to be happening on major sites or at any significant scale.

I'd wholeheartedly recommend people taking some time and reading through the CA Compliance issues on Bugzilla. The entire CA program there, in my opinion, does a fantastic and largely thankless job of keeping this whole thing on the rails. It's one of the few things I can say I had _more_ trust in the more I looked into it.

[0]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1934361

[ceejayoz]

> It's not foolproof, and it's reactive rather than proactive…

This just means you keep your powder dry until it's needed.

[cookiengineer]

> That is a wild claim

China telecom regularly has BGP announcements that conflict with level3's ASNs.

Just as a hint in case you want to dig more into the topic, RIR data is publicly available, so you can verify yourself who the offenders are.

Also check out the Geedge leaked source code, which also implements TLS overrides and inspection on a country scale. A lot of countries are customers of Geedge's tech stack, especially in the Middle East.

Just sayin' it's more common than you're willing to acknowledge.

[technion]

If you go down this path you argue desktop browsing https is broken, which i dont think is a serious argument.

[fc417fc802]

Well yes, CAs and the ICANN model of DNS are intertwined and fundamentally broken in multiple ways. However the system as a whole is largely "good enough" as can be seen from its broad success under highly adversarial conditions in the real world.

[rerdavies]

That's not really how security works. Either it's broken, or it's not. Security is only as good as the weakest link in the chain. Whether it's good enough or not... hard to say.

[fc417fc802]

That sort of reasoning only applies to algorithms - those shatter the way glass does. Other stuff is more pliable. It's entirely possible to shoplift but there's a nonzero chance you'll get caught. Is the supermarket's security broken? There are many known attacks against it so I'd say that it is.

Notice my wording above - fundamentally broken in multiple ways - by which I mean that there are clear and articulable flaws with the model. Nonetheless it's clearly quite functional in practice.

[quesera]

No one is trying to go that far down the path.

https (specifically the CA chain of trust) is imperfect, and can be compromised by well-placed parties.