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quotemstr • today at 2:40 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

Web PKI is cursed. Why should anyone have to ship a new version of Go, Electron, webpki-roots, etc. (possibly over a now-compromised TLS connection!) just to revoke a certificate? Why are so many packages independently shipping high-sensitivity trust-bootstrap credentials? And why can any CA still vouch for any domain instead of each being limited to a specific ccTLD or other non-total shard of subject names?

Also, it's quietly, in the email space, that we're seeing real innovation while browser vendors just say "no" to everything. We should be distributing trust, not centralizing it in browser vendor security teams and Let's Encrypt.


Replies

10000truths • today at 3:03 PM

Web PKI doesn't mandate that every client ship with its own root certs. The clients you listed can be configured to use a centrally managed trust store, if that's what you want. The fact that they don't by default is a deliberate tradeoff that the clients made, not some standard's fault.

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nmadden • today at 3:23 PM

> Also, it's quietly, in the email space, that we're seeing real innovation […]

Can you elaborate on this innovation in the email space around PKI?