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Mozilla wants CAs to revoke 30 random certificates per year

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Re: Mozilla wants CAs to revoke 30 random certificates per year

#5

Post by Spivak »

I think Roman Fischer in the thread has it right, 30 certs is a single drop of water the Atlantic. Like there's no wink wink necessary, at that scale it would be flatly irrational to do anything at all to handle being one of these revocations. We're taking about a roughly 0.00001% chance that it's you. Forget some dumb cert revocation logic I would play Russian Roulette with those odds.

But on the flip side those 30 unlucky souls are gonna be pissed. There's so many other less disruptive ways you could do this.

Re: Mozilla wants CAs to revoke 30 random certificates per year

#6

Post by ForHackernews »

> Would a CA be allowed to pre-notify customers whose certs were randomly selected and {pre/re}-issue them replacements?

If this is permitted, then I see no problem with this plan. It will force people to do what they already should be doing: have a plan in place to rotate certificates in case of revocation.

> The point is that right now revocation is so painful that it’s causing CAs to side with subscriber convenience over the integrity of the web PKI. Sampled, controlled revocations let us identify points of pain before they have security implications, and motivate Subscribers to prepare their systems—whether through automation or not, up to them, I’m not their dad—to tolerate on-time revocation. We care about the likely outcomes of automation, such as tolerance of short revocation or expiry timelines, really, but if BigSlowCo wants to staff a 24-hour cert maintenance squad such that they don’t (successfully) pressure their CA into blowing revocation deadlines, that’s their opex choice. Directly evaluating ecosystem capability around prompt revocation is the only way I can think of to identify areas of danger or weakness before they become issues for the web.

This is like testing the fire extinguishers.

Re: Mozilla wants CAs to revoke 30 random certificates per year

#7

Post by likeabatterycar »

alyandon wrote: post #4

That is a pretty breathtaking example of ivory tower thinking if there ever was one. I really just don't know what else I can say about that kind of proposal.

To put things into perspective, the people behind the browser with The reality is the CAs could tell Mozilla to go pound sand and they would have no recourse. Is there not a governing body for certificate policies with voting members?

CA trust should be handled at the OS vendor level. Mozilla having its own trust anchors is a relic of the past. If CAs refuse to comply, they at worst inconvenience 2.5% of their customers temporarily until they find a better browser.

Re: Mozilla wants CAs to revoke 30 random certificates per year

#9

Post by ForHackernews »

likeabatterycar wrote: post #7
alyandon wrote: post #4

That is a pretty breathtaking example of ivory tower thinking if there ever was one. I really just don't know what else I can say about that kind of proposal.

To put things into perspective, the people behind the browser with The reality is the CAs could tell Mozilla to go pound sand and they would have no recourse. Is there not a governing body for certificate policies with voting members? CA trust should be handled at the OS vendor level. Mozilla having its own trust anchors is a relic of the past. If CAs refuse to comply, they at worst inconvenience 2.5% of their custom…

>CA trust should be handled at the OS vendor level.

Who's the "vendor" for Linux? IBM?

The outcome of this idea is Google & Microsoft can MITM all internet traffic.

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