alt Hacker NewsI mean, it's an emergency, but the acute severity is debatable; many times a month the major browsers quietly deal with vulnerabilities that yield attackers direct control of victim computers; here, attackers get the ability to spoof websites if they're in a position to hijack connections.
The middlebox situation, with non-updatable roots, is very annoying. But middleboxes also have unfixable RCEs, so...
It's totally fair to evaluate different projects by how well positioned they are to update their WebPKI trust anchors. I'm just saying, keep perspective.
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Keep in mind that a _lot_ of software out there uses TLS as its only trust anchor for updates, commands or similar.
This can and will be weaponized for take-overs of systems. They will be of the consumer kind, but they will also be of the industry kind. Let's pray that they will not be of the state or military kind.
So it other words, it allowed attackers to do the one thing that Web PKI is supposed to prevent.
Being able to quickly update trust roots is at best a hack to paper over the issue when there is no good reason why every podunk CA should have authority to generate certificates for every domain in the first place. It's an inexcusable design flaw. Or a feature that gives power to root stores at the expense of everyones security, from the perspective of the root store operators.