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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25026 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026

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Obviously nation states are a threat, the problem is that CAs are not a very good way to mitigate that threat.

I am sure that the NSA can freely generate whatever certificates they want for at least half the CAs in my browser, but I am also assuming that they would prefer to just use the genuine private keys of the server instead. They can just hit google with a national security letter and make them cough up their keys. Much cleaner, because if you use a non-standard cert chain, there is always a chance your victim will publish it, which will embarrass your CAs.

Sure. I think it's probably a lot easier though for them to be like "give us access to the account belonging to this customer," and you probably get what you want. Ultimately, the trust is about whether your line is tampered, the guy on the other end can still lie on the internet. I do agree that a lot of the certs that come in by default shouldn't be trusted though, but I don't think letting governments be the steward of it encourages better outcomes

I do wish there was more popularity in the idea where a certain CA was only trusted for a certain portion of the internet and I wish there was a way in my browser to artificially impose constraints on what types of domains I trust with which certs (I may trust a certain CA to sign .cn domains but not bank.example.com).

If your point is that we should get rid of all the CAs other than Let's Encrypt, I think that this might actually be am improvement.

I do think it's good to have a little bit of diversity in the space, but yeah LE is really good. There's also the Google one as well if you want that and there's a couple of other free ones. Admittedly I was being a bit hyperbolic (probably some bank stuff still likes DigiCert)

Though I would also take crowdsourced validation. Let the website display its in-org certificate chain (with one of the root certs on top, if it must), but then let me query whatever third party I trust to see if that certificate is commonly used for that particular domain. (Though that would require judgement, which is not something one can expect of most internet users, sadly.)

You can do that today; the Certificate Transparency logs are public and basically are socially required, with strict time requirements. (CAs that don't get distrusted by the browser vendors.) Go to https://crt.sh/, search a domain, and you can find basically every cert it has had ever. You can even query the database directly by connecting to it over PostgreSQL.

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