alt Hacker NewsMy 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.
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>> 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.
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.