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Notes -
Is pki the next part of the global internet censorship regime?
In a previous post, we discussed the takedown of a foreign website that violated texas laws. I argued that domain takedowns are unlikely to be used for global censorship. But these days https certificates are becoming nearly obligatory, and the system around them is much more haphazard.
As a sideshow on the iran situation, the pgsa dot ir website is trying to stay up in the face of the sanctions. The website originally had a letsencrypt certificate, but obviously the US was able to get that yanked. After a week, they managed to get their hands on a chinese certificate. But surprisingly, only a few days later, the certificate was revoked, making the https site unviewable on certain browsers. I'm not certain exactly why the chinese issuer revoked it, but it could likely be due to pressure from above.
Unlike the internet, Google, Apple, and Mozilla pretty much control almost every browser in the world. And for an issuer it seems that there are no rules when it comes to having your certificates accepted on those browsers, simply beg and kiss ass to each of them until they decide to let you in the club. This means that anywhere, having an https website happens at the whim of these 3 American companies, and each one pretty much has a veto over the process. It's no wonder that they all go to lengths to put up big warnings and gimp functionality on http websites.
Of course it remains to be seen whether or not this lever of censorship will be used in the future and for what purposes. Can an SF judge order Mozilla to start rejecting certain certificates? Not sure. Right now there's also the escape hatch of simply using http, but browser makers will continue to push more and more invasive warnings about it.
On all of those you can add custom roots and chains. Now whether you would want to put Iranian government root just to visit their sites securely is up to you.
IIRC not all US government-issued certificates are recognized by the default on the listed browsers. At least, I've run into SSL warnings from them before that indicated as such in the past. The reverse you hope would be true too: important systems probably shouldn't need to trust foreign CAs for just any sites.
Also, I think Firefox on most platforms (Windows, most notably) trusts the OS's CA list: Microsoft probably has more sway than Mozilla. The one time I can think of this power was used, it was against Symantec for what seemed at the time (2018) quite reasonable reasons.
As I understand the documentation, it trusts root certs that have been added to the OS by an administrator or user but not those included by Microsoft or Apple.
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